


Vigilante Skies

by BethNottingham



Series: Vigilante Skies [1]
Category: Smallville
Genre: 9x09, 9x09 Pandora, AU Character Death, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon au character death, Clark Kent Whump, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Graphic Sex, Partly canon compliant, Torture, Whump, basically if you've seen the episode this will not surprise you, canon-typical au, cellmate drama, chapter-specific warnings, lois lane whump, non-graphic torture in my opinion but I have a high threshold, the dog does not die, wild creative liberties taken with all kinds of military shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28306182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethNottingham/pseuds/BethNottingham
Summary: Lois Lane picked up a time travel ring and catapulted herself a year into the future, landing in right in the middle of the apocalypse. She did not, however, stay only for 24 hours and then return quickly and easily. An extended story surrounding the 9x09 Pandora flashback, following Lois and Clark’s adventures and relationship in the ruins of the world. Featuring: gratuitous angst, a Totally Necessary airplane scene, and Shayera Hall (NOT getting fridged). Basically the way the story of the invaded world might have gone if it had been the major plot of the season, and not confined to the runtime of a flashback in a single episode.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Lois Lane
Series: Vigilante Skies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2089917
Comments: 24
Kudos: 19





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone (or, well, probably all three of you who are still in this fandom - I'm late to the party). I've been rewatching Smallville while in quarantine and 9x09 - Pandora really stood out to me as "this flashback could have actually been the plot of a whole season if the writers had decided to play it that way." And so I did. 
> 
> There's a little here-there-be-dragons with this work; as I said in the tags I have a really high tolerance for characters getting hurt, so while I don't think I crossed any really big lines, if you're sensitive to such things please take note of any chapters that begin with "see endnotes for specific warnings." I'll put spoilery trigger warnings in that way so you can scroll down and decide if it's your cup of tea before you read. (If it says canon trigger warning then it's something that occurred at least similarly to the episode but I'm warning for it because it's described instead of shown on a screen; if it just says tw/non-canon tw then it's something I added that wasn't in the episode).

Lois rubbed her hand where Jimmy had stepped on it, trying not to be irritated with him as she slipped out of Tess’s office. Her cousin was missing, Clark was stonewalling her (as usual), The Blur was making grandiose plans for his own impending death, and to top it all off, apparently her boss was plotting a literal alien invasion. 

She was so not equipped to handle any of this on three days with practically no sleep.

“You know, I miss the maid costume.” Lois whirled on her heel, too tired even to glare at the poised ginger woman as she descended the stairs and strode into Lois’s space. 

“I've stopped cleaning up after you,” she shot back. She didn’t have the energy for this. She didn’t even have the time for this—too many important things were happening in the world, and she just didn’t have room to deal with Tess’s (completely founded, but that was beside the point) suspicions about her sneaking around. 

“You could've fooled me,” Tess smirked. “I have to say, I’ve come to expect better reconnaissance skills from my reporters… But the bar's always been lower for you, hasn't it?” 

“Look,” Lois sighed, not rising to the jab. “I know family loyalty means nothing to you, but I would do anything to find Chloe. If that means you need to fire me,” she spread her arms in a wide, expressive shrug. “Pull the trigger.” 

“I plan to,” Tess assured her, advancing as Lois retreated towards her desk, keys and the door to the copy room where she could hopefully go around this ultimately petty issue. 

“But this actually has very little to do with Chloe,” Tess finished. Adrenaline spiking, Lois took another step back. “You saw it, didn't you?” Tess hissed.

“I don’t have it in me to play the pronoun game tonight,” Lois said coolly. Wouldn’t this be a great time for The Blur to ‘check up on her’ again and cause a distraction so she could get out of here and track down her cousin and the Creature from the Black Lagoon?

“Lois,” Tess demanded of her and the Blur-free office at large, “where is the orb?”

“What orb?” she snapped.

“The alien technology from my vault,” Tess responded evenly. An image of the LuthorCorp doctor from the video, blood decorating his face as he was interrogated, flashed through her mind. 

“Oh,” she responded, turning to grab her keys, which were finally within reach, “that orb.” Tess’s foot crashed down on her already aching hand, knocking her keys to the floor. Lois shifted automatically into a ready stance. At least she didn’t have to keep up with anything more on a mental level, she reasoned.

“I guess asking for severance is out of the question,” she quipped as Tess attacked her. She dodged and elbowed, pulling the taller woman across her desk and wrestling with her, no strategy, no escape in mind, just trying to hit every bit of her she could reach. 

Rage coursed through her, thinking of how the world was held at the mercy of the rich and powerful who squandered those gifts by plotting horrible things, while small, ordinary people like her cousin got caught in the crossfire. Reaching blindly behind her head, her hand connected with something solid from the open drawer of Clark’s desk, and she gripped it and smashed it over her boss’s head, breaking the woman’s hold on her and tumbling both of them to the floor.

“I didn't want this,” Tess gritted out, pressing a hand to where Lois guessed she’d hit, blood dripping down her hand.

“No,” Lois growled, scrambling to her feet, the object still gripped in her hand, “You just wanna take over the world with some alien nation.”

“I am trying to save the world!” Tess shouted, fighting onto her feet as well and swinging wildly at Lois, who stepped back, but tripped over the garbage can that one of them must have knocked over. Rolling to get out of range, she felt the object in her hand - a black and white box, she finally saw - come open, and something small and metal fell out, bouncing closer to her along the floor. 

“What's wrong with Greenpeace?” she demanded, grabbing the metal object instinctively. It was a heavy gold ring with a large letter L on it, and for a wild moment she thought that Clark had stolen some Luthor family heirloom. She let it slip onto her finger as she tried again to get to her feet, mind spinning as she tried to connect all of the pieces it was picking up. If she could just figure out what Tess was plotting, if she could just work out how the aliens and the creature who took her cousin and Clark Freakin’ Kent were all connected… 

As the ring slipped onto her finger and that thought entered her mind, there was a blinding flash of violet light. 

The room seemed to melt into nothing around her, and then she was melting into nothing, and then all she knew was blissful unconsciousness.


	2. Rough Landing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Episode-compliant trigger warning - see endnotes

Vertigo hit Lois like a speeding truck directly to her head, and her cheek was pressed against the floor in a smeared instant, without her having any memory of falling. She blinked, exhaling to blow her hair out of her face, before sitting up quickly - too quickly. After her head’s second meeting with the floor, she lay still for a moment, breathing and taking stock of herself. She flexed her hands, still sore from where she’d hit Tess moments ago. An unfamiliar gold ring rested heavily on her index finger. A heartbeat later, she remembered picking it up out of that box from Clark’s desk drawer after using it as a bludgeon.

The air around her was so still, and as the seconds passed she realized that Tess should have made a move - or at least a sound - by now. Sitting up again (more slowly this time) she looked around herself, noting the deep red light streaming through the window, the coating of dust on the floor disturbed only by her own movements.

“Tess!” she shouted, then coughed violently as her lungs protested all the dust. “Where are you?” she tried again once she could breathe. “Don't start what you can't finish,” she challenged, standing and running a hand through her hair to shake off what it had collected from the floor. “What the hell?” she whispered as the room remained just as empty as it had seemed to be for the last several seconds. There were no retreating footsteps, no flying bullets, no nothing.

She was alone.

The elevators weren’t working; the button didn’t even glow when she jiggled it, and after several futile moments of listening for the mechanism to whir to life, resigned herself to taking the stairs. Luckily she’d worn comfortable shoes - she shuddered to think what would have happened to her poor feet if she’d somehow confronted Tess as Stiletto.

The outside air hit her like opening an oven, and she immediately began sweating as she strode out into the unseasonable heat wave, turning on the spot to look up and down the street. Stray papers blew across the cracked asphalt, and the wind whistled around cars whose positions against the curb looked much more comfortable than was legal in the heart of downtown.

“Hello?” She shouted, still turning, her eyes rising to look in confusion at the blazing sun, too big and too red as it hung low in the sky to possibly be real. ‘Out of all possible dream scenarios my mind could have come up with after that bitch Tess Mercer knocked me out, it had to be some weird abandoned Mad Max world?’ she groused internally as she picked a direction and started walking, idly surveying an unfamiliar building as she did. 

‘Why couldn’t it at least have been a good dream? Something with donuts and jacuzzis and naked men in it?’ Half of the building was crumbling, much like the rest of the city now that she looked at it, but the other half stood tall and proud, a blinding orb of red light pulsing at the top. Between the towers hung a huge red flag, with four diamonds emblazoned on it like a dying poinsettia. “Tacky,” she muttered, but before she could continue to judge the changed landscape, a familiar woosh of air allerted her that she had company.

Whirling with a gasp, hoping to see a tall man in vibrant red and blue, she was disappointed when the stranger facing her showed no signs of recognition or pleasure to see her. He was dressed all in black, with a long trench coat and a singular dog tag around his neck. Definitely not The Blur.

“Why are you out of uniform?” he demanded by way of greeting. Lois blinked, incredulous, waiting for evidence that she’d been punk’d to spring from the abandoned landscape, or for the man to crack a smile. When neither thing happened, she folded her arms and squared her shoulders, refusing to be intimidated by his weirdness and sudden, Blur-like arrival.

“Maybe because I dropped out of girl scouts years ago,” she quipped back, eyebrow twitching up as she felt her eyes narrow.

“You're bleeding,” the man realized aloud, and while Lois hardly expected anything like sympathy from him based on his demeanor, his next conclusion shocked her. “You're nothing but a filthy human,” he growled. “This zone is off limits to your kind.”

“But this dream is all mine,” she shot back, reminding herself that - since none of this was real - she should be able to take control. Just focus on donuts and naked guys. “So what's with the attitude?

“It is not your place to ask questions,” the unfriendly man snarled, taking a step towards her. She held her ground, but uncrossed her arms as she slid one foot back slightly and bent her knees, anticipating the need to defend herself.

“I'm a reporter.” Hopefully this tenacious dream would reset itself to something at least a little more familiar if she just kept arguing with it. “Asking questions is in my blood.”

“Well, then... it would be a shame to spill it.” The man took another step towards her. This time, she stepped back. He mirrored her, and she felt her adrenaline rising, heart beating wildly. Dream or not, she decided she did not like this guy in her space. That was when her eyes fell on the phone booth behind the stranger

“The Red-Blue Blur,” she exclaimed, and she didn’t know if it was a threat or a prayer. “He'll stop you.” The man laughed at that. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

“Not under a red sun. Look around you.” He gestured, at first it seemed to the city at large, but then she realized he was looking at a tattered black and white flag hung from one of The Planet’s several flagpoles. “Your Blur is dead.” It wasn’t a flag, she realized belatedly. It was a tee shirt - black except for a white S shape inside of a diamond shape. 

But what did that have to do with the Blur, she wondered? His colors were, obviously, red and blue.

The stranger’s hands were on her then, and she reacted with years of trained instinct courtesy of her father, whirling her arm up in an arc to break his hold, then rearing back to punch him in the jaw as hard as she could.

She felt two of her fingers break on impact, the shock traveling up her arm and numbing her shoulder, forcing her arm to fall limply to her side as she choked down a cry of pain.

“Insect,” the man (or whatever he was) snarled, and Lois had just enough time to think that the pain should have woken her up immediately before his returning punch to her head robbed her instantly of conscious thought.

-0-

For the second time that day (or at least, she hoped it was still the same day) Lois awoke with her face pressed against a dusty floor. 

“Hey,” someone was saying above her, and she cracked her eyes open to see a woman talking to a pair of children, “time for food.” At the word food, Lois’s stomach growled, and the woman looked almost fearfully over in her direction before ushering her children away. 

Sitting up, Lois prodded gingerly at her bruising cheek with her right hand, not ready to look down at the damage to her left. Nothing felt broken in her face, which she supposed was mercy. Or else the rude stranger couldn’t have been bothered to hit her any harder. She swallowed, trying futilely to wet her dry throat, and stood up, careful not to use her left arm. 

The light was still red, the air was still hot, and the structure she was in this time had all windows and exits covered up with chain link fencing and razor wire. Upon closer inspection, she recognized with mounting horror that she was in some perversion of the Kent’s barn.

“What,” she mouthed, but didn’t have the chance to get anything further out before a shouting voice interrupted her train of thought.

“You!” a woman’s voice cut through the air, “Move it.” Lois rounded the corner to exit the stall she’d been in, her eyes taking in the other people milling around the barn, their heads down, their feet shuffling, before she finally focused on the source of the commotion. “I said move,” a woman in all black with her own singular dog tag was ordering, as she pushed a man forward, her effort appearing minimal, but he fell violently as if she’d hit him with far greater force than her size should have allowed. ‘So everyone with the ugly dog tags has super strength,’ Lois mentally catalogued, ‘got it. It’s really time to wake up now, Lois!’

“Stealing will not go unpunished,” the woman announced, and then Lois gasped in shock as her eyes glowed gold, beams of heat pouring out from them and burning into the poor man’s back, searing off his shirt and blistering his flesh into an intricate symbol. The man screamed helplessly. Lois lurched forward a step, but her left hand throbbed mockingly. What could she possibly do to help him if she couldn’t even hit these people without breaking her fists?

The woman rounded on the crowd, and Lois felt rather than saw the way the other prisoners - as that was clearly what they all were - backed away, leaving her alone and rooted to the spot, the new object of the woman’s ire. Behind her, the man’s flesh was still smoking as he seemed to fight for a moment to get up before giving in and collapsing flat on the ground.

“Okay, easy,” Lois exclaimed as the woman stepped into her space and her hand throbbed again. She was the first to admit that reading a room wasn’t always her strong suit, but this was definitely the time to make herself seem like the polar opposite of a threat. “I was just hoping for some food here. And I'm pretty sure this is a bad dream,” she added, swallowing and praying that she was right and would wake up any minute now. “But right now, I could eat about 30 maple doughnuts.”

“You want food?” the woman quoted mockingly, looking her up and down. “I’m stuck here babysitting you pathetic humans, and now you expect me to, what, play nursemaid?” Her unnatural blue eyes fixed on Lois’s. “I should kill you right where you stand,” she murmured, and Lois felt the other prisoners backing off further. She was really in trouble now, wasn’t she? 

“Okay, easy there Zelda,” Lois placaded, taking a slow step back. The woman advanced on her - this was starting to feel familiar. “Wasn’t trying to offend you. I just got here, and I don’t really know what’s going on.”

The woman’s lip curled in contempt. “Then you haven’t done any work for your food, have you?” she sneered. “What do you intend to trade for it then?”

Lois stood there, completely at a loss for what this woman could possibly want from her as the smell of burned cloth and flesh seared into her brain. The jailer took a step closer, and for a moment, Lois was sure this was it. This was how and where she was going to die, at the hand (or more appropriately the laser eyes) of some angry stranger.

Then a familiar arm encircled her waist, a familiar chest pressed against her back, and she felt herself being turned to the side, another body placing himself between her and the woman. She knew the feel of his hands before he even spoke, and her heart jumped into her mouth. This nightmare had just gotten ten times brighter.

“Take this,” Clark said, and she realized that he was holding his hand out to the jailer, the brown leather strap of his father’s watch clutched in his fingers. “It’s all I have,” he added, his grip tightening around her as he turned a fraction more, trying to move her out of the line of fire. “It’s yours if you let her go.” 

Taking the watch and turning it over critically in her hand, the woman glanced down at it, and then up at its owner. “It’ll do,” she agreed, then looked over at Lois coldly. “For now,” she added, before turning and walking away.

“Smallville?” Lois breathed and he turned to face her, his hand still planted firmly on the small of her back.

“I thought I'd lost you forever,” he whispered, as he raised his other hand, his fingers hovering over her bruised cheek. There was something terribly hollow in his face - in his wide eyes as he looked at her and the way his lips kept twitching up like he was happy to see her but had forgotten how to smile. 

Lois flung her arms around him, burying her face in his light blue shirt and breathing in his familiar scent as she tried desperately to hold back tears.

This wasn’t a dream.

She might have been cynical enough to come up with such an awful hellscape of a world, and her imagination was probably nightmare-fueled enough to conjure up the smell of burning flesh and remember the feeling of broken bones, but there was no way that any part of her subconscious was capable of dreaming up a Clark Kent who’d lost his smile.

“Clark,” she nearly sobbed, “thank God.”

“I can't believe you're alive,” he whispered into the shoulder of her jacket, and she could hear that he was holding back tears too.

“Can’t believe  _ I’m  _ alive?” she responded, pulling away, but only enough to look him in the face. A jagged cut on his cheekbone drew her eye to the yellowing bruises around it, and she swallowed hard. For all of his bumbling charm, Clark Kent had always seemed somehow indestructible. It was jarring to see him bleed like everyone else. One of his hands was pressed against the back of her head, his fingers threaded through her hair, and he seemed reluctant to let her go. 

“Clark, what  _ happened  _ here?” she demanded in a strained whisper, looking around in lieu of gesturing when one hand was injured and the other was too busy not letting go of Clark either. In the background, a couple of people had ventured to the entrance to help the burned man inside. Lois’s eyes locked onto him, her pulse thundering in her ears. 

“Since when did the Kent family farm become a prison? And,” she added, the realization snapping her eyes away from the injured man and back up to Clark’s, “why would you give away the one thing of your dad's that meant so much to you?” He’d handed that watch over without a moments’ hesitation, after all that it meant to him and everything he’d done to keep it safe.

“I did it for you,” he said softly, a frown creasing his forehead like he didn’t understand why  _ she  _ wouldn’t understand him just handing over a memento of his father’s to come crazy lazer-eyed woman.

“Okay, hold on,” Lois changed the subject, shaking herself a little. Clark pulled her gently over to one of the stalls and she followed him gratefully, not wanting to stare at the injured guy any longer. “Explain about the wicked witch and the flying freaks. Have we been invaded by ‘The Wizard of Oz’ or something?”

“More like another planet,” Clark responded softly, a new, enigmatic sadness in his face. He dropped his eyes, and noticed her fast-swelling fingers for the first time.

“Your hand!” he exclaimed, and she released the back of his shirt to cradle it with her left, deciding it was time to inspect the damage. Nothing was protruding, thank what little luck she had left. She couldn’t move her first two fingers, and the whole hand was a throbbing mass of pain.

“I punched the guy who grabbed me outside The Planet,” she explained. “Apparently, aliens have steel for bones.”

“That—” Clark breathed, his fingers hovering over the gold ring, forgotten on her right index finger. “Lois, where did you—”

“From a box in your desk,” she responded, guessing his meaning. “Tess and I had the knock down drag out fight that’s been brewing between us since we first met, and I grabbed it to defend myself with. Actually…” she muttered, “Clark, she went on and on about some orb—called it alien technology, said there was life inside of it. This invasion… Tess knew about it!”

“Tess helped,” he responded in a strangled whisper, his eyes still fixed on her swollen fingers. He swallowed, then met her eyes again. 

“She was working with their leader, Zod. I tried to fight him,” he confessed, and Lois’s heart wrenched, imagining Clark Kent going up against an army of alien invaders with a shotgun and far too much courage for an ordinary farmer. He always had to play the hero, even when he was in way over his head, didn’t he?

No wonder they’d taken  _ his  _ home specifically to pervert into their prison. 

“I made all the wrong choices.” He shook his head, eyes closing like he didn’t want to look at the truth. “A lot of people died.”

“Please tell me Chloe wasn't one of them.” Lois could feel her whole body tensing up, preparing for an emotional blow.

“I don’t know,” he shook his head helplessly. “After I thought I lost you, I went off on my own. I haven't talked to her in months.”

“Months?” she repeated, not even sure how to approach what he’d just said. He gently maneuvered them until they were sitting down on the dirty floor, his body between her and the rest of the barn, his warm hands still resting on her. 

He hadn’t let go once since he’d seen her, like he was afraid if he did that she would vanish into thin air.

“Lois,” he admitted, meeting her eyes again with his too-hollow ones, “you vanished a year ago.” 

She swallowed, once, then again.

“No,” she protested, shaking her head slowly, trying to make the math add up. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t. “I was just throwing down with Tess a few hours ago.”

“And then you grabbed this?” Clark guessed, his fingers ghosting over the surface of the ring. “This is a Legion ring; it must have brought you here when you put it on.”

“Brought me here  _ how _ ?” she demanded, pulling the ring off with her teeth and holding it up between them to examine it. Clark’s hand closed over hers immediately, hiding it from view.

“Time travel,” he breathed, leaning forward so his forehead was resting on her shoulder, his voice hardly making a sound. “Listen to me very carefully. That ring is your only way out of here; keep it safe, and don’t let anyone see it.” 

None of that made any sense of course, but Lois slipped the ring into the coin pocket of her jeans, shoving it to the bottom with her thumb. The question of why Clark Kent had had a time travel ring in a box in his desk could be tabled for a later time, she supposed.

“So I’ve been gone a year, huh?” she said, eyes roving over the space around them. “I disappear and the apocalypse happens. Guess I was important after all,” she laughed; a transparent attempt to lighten the mood.

“Lois, you always were,” Clark murmured, his eyebrows creasing again and his mouth spasming like he was really, truly trying to remember how to make it smile. It hurt to watch. A memory surfaced, unbidden, of the two of them strapped down to chairs attached to a generator, and a madman with a polygraph demanding proof of their love for one another. She’d hurt herself emotionally to avoid hurting him physically that day, and later on he’d handed her the perfect opportunity to cover it up and save face. 

She had loved him all the more for that. She had  _ not  _ allowed herself to wonder what he would have said if he hadn’t managed to miraculously break them out in the nick of time.

This wasn’t how she ever would have wanted to find out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So remember how in the actual flashback a guy gets branded for stealing? Yeah that happens, but this is a fic so instead of seeing it on screen and then the camera cutting away, it's described and Lois has thoughts and fears about it.


	3. Controlled Airspace

Lois was very much a “have my fun then go home and sleep in my own bed” kind of girl, so when she woke up with her head on Clark’s chest, his arms still wrapped securely around her, she was disoriented for a long moment. It was freezing, with the sun down, and she found herself burrowing into him like she would curl up under her blankets if her room was too cold when she woke up. He adjusted his grip in his sleep, his cheek pressed against the top of her head. She’d always figured that the world would end before she had the chance to wake up next to someone who loved and appreciated her, so she let herself relax for a long moment.

Oh, right. The world  _ had  _ ended. Head in the game, Lois.

The faintest pink light was glowing up from the eastern horizon, signifying that the blazing red sun was about to follow - it was the eerie quiet that had disturbed her. Her brain had put together Clark’s scent with all the times she’d taken over his room, and woken her up in expectation of that damn rooster. Nothing crowed. She hadn’t seen any animals since her arrival, not even Shelby, and she hadn’t asked Clark what had happened to them; he seemed so fragile, and nothing about the evisceration of his home could possibly be good news.

“Wha—” he muttered, moving slightly beneath her and looking down as he blinked sleep from his eyes. Seeing her, he managed a small smile before pressing his lips to the top of her head and tightening his hold on her. “Still can’t believe you’re here,” he whispered. She pressed an answering kiss to his collarbone, but before she could say anything in return, she heard the lazer-eye’d woman’s voice shatter the quiet.

“Up, now!” she demanded, and movement began all around the barn, people scrambling to their feet and shaking bits of straw from themselves. Lois sat up, running the fingers of her uninjured hand through her hair.

“Stay here,” said Clark. “I’ll be back with breakfast.” Her stomach growled ravenously and she couldn’t exactly argue with him. They hastily split what was clearly a portion meant for one - the whole “you don’t work you don’t eat” thing was serious around here - before the alien jailer was shouting at them to fall in. The line of prisoners filed obediently out of the barn, climbing into ancient, rusty school busses as the temperature rose quickly around them.

“That’s broken?” a vaguely familiar man asked as he sat down in the seat in front of the one Clark had led them to, and Lois held up her hand to let what she realized was that one perpetually bored nurse from Smallville General inspect the damage. “You’ll need to avoid using it as much as you can for the next few weeks,” he explained as he expertly splinted and immobilized the digits with half a pencil and a long strip off the bottom of Clark’s shirt. “Not the easiest thing to do where we’re going,” he admitted, tying off the dressing.

“And where’s that exactly?” Lois asked, taking her hand back with a smile of gratitude as the nurse turned quickly to face forward. A human was driving the vehicle, but the occasional whooshes on either side from Alia the Angry Alien flying back and forth between the busses were enough to remind everyone that they were being watched.

“One of the old LuthorCorp factories,” Clark explained quietly. “When the Kandorians catch humans in the restricted zone, if they don’t kill them right away, they use them as slave labor, building the crystals they use for their control consoles and traditional architecture.” 

Something about the way he’d phrased that struck Lois as off, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. 

As soon as they arrived at the factory, another Kandorian in a black trenchcoat and dog tags separated them, sending Lois in one direction with a number of the others, and Clark off with what looked like the biggest and strongest of the group. For a moment, his face blanched with panic like he was going to protest the separation. 

Noticing that he wasn’t immediately following his fellow prisoners to their designated area, Alia delivered a quick punch to his stomach, making him double over in pain. At the same time, the nurse has wrapped a hand tightly around Lois’s upper arm and dragged her along, likely sparing her the same treatment from the closest guard. By the time Clark had straightened up, his fellow prisoners pulling him in his own correct direction, a heavy metal door was clanging shut between them.

Lois took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and followed the others to stations where they were told to measure and mix various chemicals together into little kits. With her dominant hand out of commission, Lois found out the hard way within the first few minutes that spilling anything earned her a slap to the face so hard her ears rang and her vision blurred. Spilling any on herself left her with tiny puckered burns on any exposed skin. 

She got impressively good at using her right hand that day.

There was no break for lunch, no chance to sit down, and by the time the sun was slanting through the windows and she was being herded back towards the exit, she was rethinking her description of her low-heeled boots as “comfortable.” Her feet felt like someone was trying to drive nails through them in several places. Somehow she doubted her unfriendly captors would let her run a quick errand to Payless - this wasn’t going to end well.

The “big strong men” group emerged from another door, and Lois straightened up, looking through the sweat-covered, shirtless bodies for Clark. It took her a long moment to find him, hunched at the back as he fumbled to get his shirt back on. He wasn’t quick enough for the pattern of bruises and scars on his stomach to escape her notice, and she flinched looking at them. When he met her gaze, he still couldn’t quite smile, not like he used to, but time and pain and weariness seemed to drop from his face as their eyes met.

She had to get them out of here. That much was exceedingly clear.

“You okay?” he asked, putting his arm around her as they filed onto the bus. 

“For a given definition of okay,” she responded, leaning into him - he put his arm around her and rested his cheek against the top of her head.

“How’s your stomach?” Lois checked, her fingers ghosting over where she knew the bruises lay beneath his shirt. 

“I’ve had worse,” he said with a shrug, and she supposed that was the best she was going to get out of him. He never was the type of guy to admit when he was hurt. She had to get him out of here. Then she had to get him to go to therapy and learn how not to carry the weight of the entire world on his ordinary human shoulders. She wasn’t sure which of those two things was more impossible, but let no one say that Lois Lane didn’t aim high.

For their second meal of the day, Lois had apparently done enough work to get in line on her own, take a bowl of thin soup and a dry roll and sit down on the floor with Clark, that nurse, and two other people - man and woman - whom she didn’t recognize, but who seemed to know Clark. They ate in silence, everyone too hungry to waste time speaking.

“You,” a man’s voice commanded, and all five of them looked up quickly to see the man who’d originally found Lois in Metropolis glowering down at them. He was looking directly at her. “General Zod would like to see you.”

“What for?” Lois shot back through a mouthful of bread, but before the words had even finished leaving her mouth, the man had wrapped one iron-like hand around her upper arm and was hauling her up. Clark sprang to his feet, but the alien punched him so hard he flew halfway across the barn, crushing a wooden table and spilling a bucket of water over him where he lay.

“Clark!” she exclaimed, pulling at the man’s grip as she watched him for any sign that his neck hadn’t broken on impact, but a moment and a disconcerting woosh of air later, she was standing in the main office of the Luthor Mansion. She whirled, wanting to demand that the man return her to the barn so she could make sure Clark was okay, but he was already gone. She was alone.

The desk was covered in food - fruits and pastries and chocolates - and her stomach growled, not at all satisfied by her tiny meal. 

“I guess membership has its privileges,” she muttered, walking forward and reaching for the first thing her eye fell on.

“Try the truffle,” said an accented voice from above her, and she wrenched her gaze away from the food and up to the lofted library. “It's my favorite,” the tall, thin man continued conversationally. He wasn’t wearing the trenchcoat like the other Kandorians, but his dog tag gleamed in the light from the stained glass windows.

Figuring a sugar buzz wouldn’t go amiss, Lois reached for one of the lumps of chocolate, only to have it deftly pulled from her fingers as the man appeared next to her in a rush of wind. She narrowed her eyes. The whole alien sadist thing was getting old, and her temper had not improved after 24 hours of hunger combined with hard labor.

“To think... a few of these could mean the difference between life and death for your kind,” he mused, popping the treat into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. “Mmm. I'm General Zod,” he introduced himself. That name rang a bell. Clark had said he was the leader of the alien invaders. “And all of this is mine to give..,” he added, gesturing at the spread before fixing his hard eyes on hers, “if you give me the names of whoever snuck you into the restricted zone.”

For a long moment, Lois found herself confronted with a world where this would work - where a halfway decent meal would be enough for someone to betray their own people. She hadn’t even been here that long and she could imagine that eventually, a hungry, exhausted version of her might break down enough to take that deal.

Luckily, she wasn’t there yet.

“My dad's a general, too,” she said coolly, looking him up and down, wondering if these “men of steel” had any weaknesses. Eyes? Groin?

“Oh?” Zod questioned, snagging another truffle.

“And  _ he _ still couldn't get me to spill how I got an M1 Abrams tank to take me to prom,” she finished with a smirk. “So I'm definitely not telling  _ you  _ anything.”

His hand was around her neck in an instant, cutting off her air and the blood flow to her brain. He lifted her up, pulling her face close to his so he could snarl right into it.

“Then you hear this!” She groped futilely at his hand, struggling for oxygen. “No matter how many times you resistance fighters break into the zone, you'll never,” he hissed, digging his fingers suddenly into her pocket. She choked out what little noise of protest she could manage. “Never take down my tower.” 

He dropped her, and she collapsed onto her knees, gulping down huge lungfuls of air and glaring balefully up at him. He was holding the time-travel ring contemplatively between his fingers. 

“What’s this?” he asked, looking from it back down at her. She was saved the need to think up a lie by the door opening and none other than Tess Mercer striding in, all dressed up in combat fatigues with a shiny new dog-tag swinging around her neck, not looking like a human who’d spent the last year being used as slave labor to grow crystals.

“Lois?” she greeted her in surprise. Lois stumbled to her feet, her right fist connecting satisfyingly with the woman’s jaw before two more dog-tag-wearing Kandorians appeared on either side of her to restrain her.

“You redheaded rat!” she screeched, bucking and pulling against the arms clamped over her own. She didn’t even have enough brain power left to come up with any good insults - all she could focus on was the red clouding her vision and the desperate desire to get her hands on Tess Mercer and rip her into teeny tiny pieces.

“Do you know her?” Zod asked, pocketing the ring and retrieving his own long jacket from where it was draped over the desk chair.

“She used to work for me,” Tess responded coolly, rubbing her face where Lois’s fist had connected. “But then she disappeared, the same day you and your Kandorians arrived on Earth.”

“Traitor!” Lois shrieked, her legs leaving the floor as she swung her whole body up to try and kick at the woman. Tess stepped back in time to avoid the assault, leaving Lois flailing uselessly in mid-air until her momentum gave out. The men holding her began to twist at her arms, forcing her painfully to her knees.

“I am this planet's savior!” Tess snapped, her impassive facade cracking. “I helped General Zod take power to ensure this earth's survival.”

“Oh, Tess Mercer, the ultimate ecoterrorist,” Lois spat, her brain finally coming back online and supplying her with the vocabulary to express her hatred.

“And what are  _ you _ , Lois Lane?” Zod asked, turning back to her and folding his arms across his chest. “I understand you’re quite close to Clark Kent. He’s usually so restrained with his fellow prisoners - I suppose it was only a matter of time before the resistance got to him.”

“The only thing I'm resisting,” Lois grit out, “is the urge to kick both your asses. And if Clark were here right now, he would back me up.” 

“You know, at first I kept Clark alive because I'd hoped he'd join us to bridge the gap between our people,” Zod sighed. Something about that didn’t sound right, but Lois was far too angry to riddle it out. “But no matter how hard we’ve worked to get him to see the good that we’re doing, he hasn’t come around.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lois laughed, hearing a touch of hysteria in her voice, “I’m sure taking over his planet, turning his home into a prison, killing his dog, using him as a slave and  _ beating him every time he steps out of line  _ has been _ really endearing _ .” Tess didn’t hit as hard as the aliens did, but pain blossomed across her cheek from the other woman’s backhand nonetheless. Lois’s mouth filled with blood where she’d bitten down on her cheek, and she spat it up at the red-head.

“The troubling thing about pain, Miss Lane,” the former CEO explained, her eyes narrowing, “is that it can be bourn. It can be gotten used to. For someone like Clark Kent who loves his friends more than he loves himself, pain isn’t enough of a motivator. Believe me, we’ve tried everything to get him to come over to our side - or at least to give up the location of the resistance. I’d just been thinking that he didn’t do us any more good alive - we’ve already gotten everything else we needed from him.” 

“Suppose it’s lucky then, that you came along,” Zod finished for her with a smile that would probably have been charming, if circumstances were different. If he wasn’t standing over her like she was an insect he was about to squash. If Lois hadn’t realized in that moment exactly what Tess was implying. 

They’d tortured Clark to get him to give up the resistance - but he’d never broken. 

Of course he hadn’t; his hero complex was bigger than the state of Kansas. That explained the scars.

He didn’t get close to the other prisoners. He kept to himself to keep them out of danger.

But now they had her. “Lucky” indeed.


	4. Operating Limitations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See endnotes for non-canon trigger warning.

They tied her to a chair, palms up and legs pulled too tight to shift the furniture, right next to the roaring fire. Then they dragged Clark in - his neck, at least, wasn’t broken from the blow he’d taken earlier. In the few minutes it took Alia to walk in, accept Zod’s order to “bring him” and flash to the Kent Farm and back, Lois had already pulled hard enough on the cords around her wrists to irritate her skin and loosen the impromptu splint on her hand. One of these alien bozos had been a boy scout, that much was evident.

“Lois,” Clark gasped out, tension radiating off of him. “What is this?” he demanded of Zod, who stood over her, running his fingers along the handles of Lex Luthor’s fire implements. 

“Isn’t it obvious?” Zod questioned, and Lois had to privately agree with him. She’d seen Indiana Jones. Though when she’d imagined living that experience, there had always been a lot more exploring old temples and having sex with Harrison Ford - a lot less hot poker to the face. 

“You’ve been quite reluctant to give up the location of the rebel base,” Zod continued, and Lois very deliberately did not watch as she heard a metal item being removed from the rack. She couldn’t look at Clark either, didn’t want to imagine what his face was doing. Instead she glared at Tess Mercer and the stupid dying pointsetta symbol on her dog tag like she hoped to set fire to her, just like Alia had to that poor man back in the barn. 

“Your loyalty to this planet and its people is commendable, Kal-El,” he said, the words accented by the fire being shifted gently by whichever piece of metal was in his hand. “But you’ve rather reached the end of your usefulness to us. We already have enough of your blood to ensure our continued dominance in case of any technical difficulties with the sun, and I had very nearly scheduled your execution.”

“Then kill me!” Lois’s gaze snapped to him in an instant - she couldn’t help it, his voice had sounded so raw and he’d made the offer without a moment's hesitation. “Do whatever you want to me! Take my life, let her go - she’s not even part of this!” The same two Kandorians who’d held her were flanking him, and he was straining to get loose, pure panic in his eyes. “Tess, tell them! Tell them she’s not involved!”

“She betrayed the entire human race for some crappy dog tags,” Lois grit out, glaring back at Tess, who stared impassively at Clark. “Why would she help us n—” her rant cut off in a choked cry of pain and shock as red-hot metal made contact with her forearm. 

Clark was shouting in the background - words, she thought - but all she could focus on through the agony was Tess’s green eyes, empty as they stared at what was being done to a human being in her home. The poker vanished, and Lois slumped forward, breathing hard. 

“The rebels are doomed - you must know this,” Zod was saying. He held the long metal spike up and focused his eyes on it until it glowed red. Lois squeezed her eyes shut, fighting nausea at the smell of her own burned skin and hair filled her head. “You are only prolonging their suffering, and hers.”

“I’ve told you every damn day since you captured me,” Clark was shouting, “I don’t know where the rebels are! I’d hardly had any contact with people for months when you took over, I don’t even know who survived the first assault!”

The pain was back - she locked her jaw against it, but that was worse, because she could hear Clark screaming in full high definition. A third burn and a fourth - she glanced at the blistering skin as Zod returned the poker to the fire and had to look away before she threw up what little was in her stomach. 

He’d burned that four-petaled symbol from the flag on the tower into her flesh.

“You say you didn’t have any contact with humanity at that time,” Zod was saying, and Lois glanced up blearily to see him closing in on Clark. “But you were still saving them. We stayed underground for months, watching you prance about, pulling people from fires and stopping automobile accidents, burning your family’s crest into every available piece of masonry in case the locals forgot about you. You cut ties with humans, but you never stopped being their false god.”

“I never claimed to be a—” Zod cut him off with a backhand to the face.

“You’d know the type of people who’d try to play hero,” the alien general continued. “That’s who you’d still be in contact with—and they’d never leave their savior behind to suffer torture and death without a plan. So what,” he demanded, kicking Clark in the stomach hard enough that only the men holding him kept him upright, “is,” he punctuated with another kick, “it?” He rammed his foot into his kneeling victim a third time and a tiny, panicked sob rattled out of Lois’s throat.

Clark wheezed helplessly as Zod picked up his foot and inspected it, like he thought he might’ve gotten his boot dirty. 

“I’ve already—” he gasped, “told you, there—isn’t one! I left them to face you on my own. They’ve left me in turn. If anyone’s even still alive.” His voice broke, and it was like Lois could feel his despair filling the room, like it blocked out the sun. “I accepted long ago that I was abandoned here,” he whispered. “So why can’t you?”

“I wanted you to join me on this new earth,” Zod sighed, hand straying to the curved sword he wore at his waist. Lois’s heart jumped into her throat. He wouldn't actually kill Clark… He wouldn’t. “But by your continued defiance, you force my hand. It saddens me, my Kryptonian brother, that now I must bury you beneath it.”

“Why is it,” Clark grit out, “that every time a man stands in this room and calls me ‘brother,’ he’s—” 

Lois did not find out what a man (presumably one of the Luthors given their location) had been doing that mirrored Zod’s actions, because in that moment the stained glass window behind the food-covered desk shattered, a glowing green arrow flying through it to embed in the frame of the main door. 

Zod’s head snapped around wildly to stare at the projectile, and then everything was happening too quickly for Lois to keep up. Arrows were flying, and the aliens were dragging and carrying each other in a hasty retreat out the side door, shouting about Kryptonite. Zod paused to glower ominously at Clark, who had pulled himself up and stumbled over to her, crashing to his knees as he fumbled with the knots she’d unfortunately pulled far too tight for his big, calloused fingers to manage.

“Heya, Legs,” Oliver Queen’s voice greeted her as he entered the room and pulled his hood off. “Long time no see.” 

“Oliver,” she sighed in relief as he pulled out a pocket knife and made short work of the ropes. She hugged him gingerly with her right arm, her left hanging limp and useless by her side. “Am I glad to see you and your band of merry men!”

“Actually,” the archer admitted, sounding slightly uncomfortable as he released her and turned towards the main door, “It's not my band.”

Lois barely had time to lean instinctively back into Clark and mouth ‘what?’ before a much shorter figure strode through the door and removed her hood.

“It’s hers,” Oliver finished, nodding at Chloe.

“Lois?” She exclaimed, blank shock clear on her face. “You were here?” The shock was turning to horror in her eyes as both cousins stepped forward and embraced.

“I didn't think I was ever gonna see you again,” Oliver commented from behind her as he retrieved his arrows, stashing them back in his quiver. 

“You almost didn’t,” Clark responded heavily. “Zod was about to kill me, and I’m sure Lois too. We owe you guys our lives.” 

Chloe had pulled away from the hug, and was looking at Clark over Lois’s shoulder, her face unreadable. For a long moment, no one spoke. Then one of the other men broke the tense silence, saluting Chloe with his fist over his heart.

“Ma’am, the plant has been successfully destroyed, and the prisoners from the surrounding farms are on their way to a secure location for medical care and diaspora.”

“Thank you Baldwin,” Chloe responded. “We may have won the battle, but Zod will come back harder now,” she added, addressing mostly Lois, with a cursory glance in Clark’s direction and then a similarly quick look around the room at her troops. 

“Then it's time we take a stand,” Clark announced. “Lois vanished a year ago after she put on the Legion ring.”

“You time-traveled here?” Chloe checked, her eyes widening slightly. She didn’t look at Clark this time.

“I'm pretty sure I didn't walk a whole year into the future,” Lois confirmed. “Not in these heels. The trouble is, that one-named wonder, Zod, took it. He had it in his pocket when he ran off just now.”

“We need to get the ring back,” Clark continued, taking a step forward. He looked very much like a man who was having trouble staying upright. “Then Lois can return to the past and prevent Zod's tower from being built in the first place.”

“That's not a bad thought, Clark,” Chloe said coolly, finally looking directly at him with a piercing gaze she normally reserved for when she wanted to make someone feel like a bug pinned onto a card. “But why should I trust you now? You already left us once to fight on your own.”

“I thought I could stop Zod myself,” he explained sadly, scrubbing a hand across his face. “I tried to take him on without involving you, and I was wrong. But I'm here now,” he added, eyes smouldering with the tiniest flame of renewed hope. 

Chloe turned on her heel and stalked out the door. “We’ll revisit this back at the base,” she threw over her shoulder as she went.

“You abandoned us, big guy,” Oliver sighed in response to a helpless look from Clark. “Plain and simple—and that started before you ever heard of Zod and the Kandorians.”

-0-

The ride back to the rebel base (an old military bunker about an hour outside of Metropolis) was tense and silent. The man called Baldwin was driving them in a van that had to be fifty years old, with Chloe in the passenger seat typing away at a surprisingly old-looking laptop. Oliver and another rebel were in the middle bench seat, with her and Clark in the back. His long legs wouldn’t fit, so he was on the side with the aisle so he could stretch out, which unfortunately put him on her left, her injured arm and hand between them preventing her from leaning up against him as she’d been doing so much lately. He kept looking down at it and flinching away—for her part, Lois hadn’t looked at it since they’d left the mansion. It already hurt; she didn’t feel the need to hurt over it emotionally as well.

Baldwin directed them both to the med bay once they arrived, and Lois was grateful both for the medical help and the excuse to pull Clark away from Chloe and Oliver and whatever was brewing among them. The base looked about how Lois remembered it, though beside each American flag there was another with a black fist in the center and the words For Our World ringing it. She also noticed that some of the computers had been replaced by what looked like much older machines - and none of the equipment in the medical bay looked anywhere near as state-of-the-art as it had been when she’d sprained an ankle on this base as a kid.

They gave her a proper splint for her hand, though the medic complimented that metropolis nurse’s handiwork in a pinch. Lois realized she’d never gotten his name—they’d been so caught up in the business of survival that it hadn’t occurred to her to introduce herself.

“These will scar,” the medic said quietly, applying something cold and greasy to the burns. Lois deliberately stared directly at Clark to avoid watching while her torture wounds were being treated and wrapped, though perhaps she shouldn’t have looked. He’d pulled off his shirt for the medic to check for cracked ribs, fully exposing the state his torso was in for the first time. Scars and bruises littered his skin—she’d already known that from the glimpse she got earlier, but seeing the extent of what he’d gone through in the last year winded her. 

He had that same intricate symbol burned into his back that Alia had branded the thief with. He’d been desperate enough to risk agony and permanent disfigurement—probably for something as simple and necessary as food—but never desperate enough to give away that watch. Not until she’d arrived. She swallowed, her throat dry, and thanked the Medic working on her as she clipped the bandage and pronounced her done.

They told her she would be rooming with Chloe, and then showed her and a handful of others from medical to the mess hall. She didn’t even taste the MREs (which given her experience with the stuff was probably for the best), she just ate until her hunger subsided and her head was drooping sleepily at the table.

“Hey,” Chloe was murmuring an indeterminable amount of time later, shaking her gently awake. “Let’s get you to bed.” Her room was the one The General would use when they visited this base—Lois felt a lump in her throat at the comforting normalcy as they lay down together in the large bed.

“We thought you were dead,” Chloe admitted in a strangled whisper. “You were gone for so long without a trace… even  _ I  _ couldn’t find you, and that’s saying something.”

“Sorry,” Lois whispered back, not knowing what to say. “If we can get the ring back, then I’ll never have gone missing in the first place,” she added with a sad little shrug. Chloe nodded, then rolled over to sleep.

Although she’d been deathly tired at dinner, now that she was supposed to be sleeping, restlessness gripped her. She’d been here 48 hours, and in that time she’d learned that the world had been invaded and taken over by aliens, she’d been captured, used as prison labor, and tortured, and she’d been rescued by a version of her cousin and ex who were both not on speaking terms with Clark Kent. 

And Clark Kent was a whole other can of worms for her mind to open as she tried futilely to sleep—he’d referred to humans as “them,” back in the barn, like he wasn’t one. Zod had called him “my Kryptonian brother.” Not that Lois would take the word of a space invader who’d tortured her over Clarks, but Zod had also accused Clark of running around saving people from fires and car crashes, and he hadn’t refuted it. She might not always have been the fastest on the uptake, but the pieces all went together into a familiar red-and-blue blurred picture. 

No wonder he’d thought he could fight them. But why had he tried to do it alone?

She stared at the wall for she didn’t know how long before giving up and slipping out of the bed, careful not to wake her cousin. Maybe a little walk around the base would tire her out enough to get back to sleep. 

Maybe she could find Clark and convince him to give her some straight answers for the first time in his life. Wouldn’t that be something?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter contains torture, specifically branding.


	5. Approach

The cold from the red sun’s absence seeped through the base, leeching all of the warmth out of Lois as she padded barefoot down the cement floor. She both regretted not putting her boots back on, and shuddered at the thought of wearing them for another minute. Shivering, she wrapped the hoodie of Chloe’s that she’d borrowed more tightly around herself.

“Miss Lane?” a familiar voice greeted her, and she turned to see Baldwin leaning around an office door on a rolling chair. “It’s past midnight.”

“Yeah, I know,” she responded, “but I wanted to check up on the guy who was with me when you rescued us. Medical bay said they discharged him, but they couldn’t tell me which room he was in.”

“Kent, right?” the rebel soldier muttered, leaning back into the office to grab a binder and flip through the pages. “Kara’s cousin. They put him up in one of the old offices off the command center, down that hall, two lefts then the last door on the right,” he pointed.

“Thanks,” Lois responded. “You know Kara?” she added, remembering Clark’s blonde cousin. 

“She’s stationed up north these days,” Baldwin nodded, “but she visits occasionally—looking for him I think. We dropped her an encoded message that we pulled him out, so I expect she’ll turn up soon.” Lois relaxed a little, glad to know that  _ someone  _ had been looking for Clark all this time.

“He’s probably asleep,” Baldwin added with one bushy eyebrow crooked up as Lois started down the direction he’d indicated.

“I’ll be quiet,” Lois waved him off. “But I suspect he’s a night owl.”

The office doors fit snugly to the floor, so she couldn’t see if Clark had the light on when she arrived. She hesitated, wondering if she  _ was  _ about to wake him up, before gently twisting the handle and pushing the door open a few inches to check. Soft, flickering light shone out to meet her, and she heard water splashing.

“Hey,” she greeted softly, opening the door all the way to view the room. All of the office furniture had been pushed up against the walls to make room for a bed and a small stack of clean clothes. Clark stood by the desk where he’d been washing his face in a large bowl of water. His shirt was off again, his scars gentler in the flickering light of candles placed around the room, but still visible.

“Hey,” he echoed, straightening up and toweling off, “You okay?” Lois entered the room, letting the door fall shut behind her. 

“Define ‘okay,’” she said with a humorless huff of laughter. “In the last two days, I’ve traveled through time, broke my hand, and got captured by literal aliens. I also found out that you’re the Blur, or  _ were  _ the Blur I guess,” she amended, “I’d love to know what’s going on there, if you feel like explaining.” He pursed his lips, but didn’t immediately jump into denial like he usually did. She wasn’t sure if that was because he’d given up on keeping the secret once Zod had started shooting his mouth off, or if it just meant that this older Clark who clearly loved her also trusted her.

“But despite everything, the one thing I can’t believe,” she continued, running her right hand through her hair, and making a fist and gently tugging at it in a calming gesture towards herself before letting it fall loose and rumpled around her face, “is that you and Chloe aren’t friends anymore.”

“It's not her fault,” Clark jumped in immediately, and Lois wanted to believe that—this was her cousin they were discussing after all—but she suspected his perspective was more than a little skewed by his martyr complex going into overdrive. “I turned my back on her. Lois, after you disappeared, I couldn't... I couldn't be around Oliver or Chloe. It reminded me of you, and that hurt too much,” he paused, swallowing, gripping the towel between his fingers like he didn’t know what else to do with his hands. “So... I left,” he finally admitted. “I went up north to my birth father and trained myself to fight Zod. 

“And then after all that, I still lost.”

“Stop beating yourself up,” Lois demanded immediately, walking up to him and taking the towel out of his hands and setting it on the desk so that she could interlace her right fingers with his. His warm hand automatically reached up to cradle her back, and he closed his eyes, leaning forward until his forehead rested gently against hers. “You are not alone in this,” she said, and realized from the roughness in her own voice that she was on the verge of tears. “We are going to get that ring back, and then I am going to fix all of this,” she promised. “Until then, I need you to stop pretending that you are the only one in the world who can do everything and save everyone. You’re hurting yourself for no good reason. And,” she added, looking up at him, “you’re not giving us humans enough credit.”

“Guessing I should have told you about all of that a little sooner,” he admitted sheepishly.

“You think?” she shot back, eyebrows raising. He almost smiled at her familiar sarcasm, and it hurt to think about how much pain he must have endured to take away the way he used to grin at her.

“I’m going to make sure none of this ever happens,” she said quietly.

“Most of it,” he corrected, running his hand down her arm until his fingers were hovering over the white bandage. He flinched when he got to it.

“I’m thinking I’ll get something tattooed over it,” Lois responded, trying to lighten the mood and keep him from falling back into darkness and self-loathing. “We didn’t die back there, which is the important part.” Her gaze sharpened looking up at him, thinking about the heartbreaking way he’d offered his life for hers with no hesitation. His eyes met hers, and she could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“Lois,” he admitted softly, “I died when you left.”

She kissed him then, pulling his head down so she could reach with their height difference. His arms wrapped around her, the only comforting constant she’d had in this burning apocalypse world, and he kissed her back hungrily, like he’d been waiting for this for years. 

Maybe he had. 

Maybe they both had.

“I’m here now,” she murmured against his lips before there were no more words between them, nothing left to say that would take the place of his hands sliding up under her shirt, her deft opening of his pants with one hand, the way he kicked them off then picked her up and carried her to the bed. 

Lois was no stranger to sex; she made no secret that it was an activity she enjoyed and she felt no shame over her experiences. She’d been with shy, inexperienced guys and suave womanizers, guys who jumped straight in and guys who spent so long on foreplay that she was almost bored by the time the sex part happened. Afterwards, she’d slip out as her partners dozed off, preserving their image of her in makeup and jewelry, teeth clean and properly caffeinated, and depending on the level of relationship they might call her in the morning to razz her about running off into the night.

Sex with Clark was nothing like that.

After everything they’d been through together, both in the past and in the last 48 hours, it was like the barriers between them were broken. She didn’t feel like she needed to hold anything back from him—she supposed she never really had. He was so tender with her, his hands everywhere at once. Passion coursed through her like liquor in her veins, burning her up deliciously inside. For a time, the world wasn’t ending and they weren’t taking shelter in an office on an abandoned army base. 

They were together, and that was all, and it was enough.

Afterwards, they lay tangled up in the sheets and each other, and Clark told her stories—the story of his home, his arrival to Earth, his adventures as the Blur. She rested her head on his chest, listening half to his heartbeat, half to everything she’d missed over the years when she was standing right next to him.

“That was you?” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright, when he admitted he was the one who’d switched costumes with Oliver to fool her. He nodded, smirking and biting his lip. “Did he tell you to kiss me, or was that your idea?” she added, realizing the rest of the story, her nose scrunching as she laughed remembering that day.

“That was me,” he admitted with a laugh, and then they were too busy doing more kissing to continue that discussion. 

When the sun rose, Lois was no longer surprised to be waking up in Clark’s arms. She lay still and content, letting herself imagine that the world around them was the world she had left; that they were cuddled up in her apartment, or maybe his room at the farmhouse, and all was right with the world.

“Clark,” Kara’s familiar voice interrupted the stillness as the door opened abruptly. Clark shifted and blinked, noticing his cousin marching into the room just as she in turn noticed the state he was in and whirled on her heel to turn away from them. “Oh!” she exclaimed awkwardly. “Um, hi Lois.”

“Long time no see,” Lois laughed, way beyond being embarrassed by something like this. Clark on the other hand was looking wildly between them, his endearing good-country-boy awkwardness still perfectly intact post-apocalypse, she was happy to realize.

“I’ll just, um, knock next time,” Kara offered. “I’m glad you’re okay Clark, I was really worried.”

“Totally okay,” Clark echoed, but Lois noticed the way he subtly pulled the sheets up, hiding his scars from view in case she turned around again. There was nothing he could do about the big cut on his cheekbone or the bruises on his face though—Kara was never going to believe that he was unhurt. “And glad to see you—um…” he trailed off.

“I’ll just, go and let you get dressed,” Kara offered with a snort, walking quickly back out the way she’d come. “Chloe’s calling a meeting in the main office,” she added over her shoulder.

“We’ll be there,” Lois responded as the door swung shut behind the blonde alien. As soon as they were alone, she dissolved into giggles, collapsing onto Clark’s chest. 

“That was one way to wake up,” he muttered, cheeks flaming as he kissed the top of her head.

-0-

Lois recognized about half the people gathered together—both in person and their voices over a collection of ancient tube radios set up on a table in the middle of the room. With tech-savvy Chloe being the leader of the group, Oliver Queen likely funding them, and their base being here, in a top-of-the-line military base, it continued to surprise and confuse her that they were only using old, mothballed technology for everything. She heard Dinah Lance and Arthur Curry over the radio, and wondered where they were in this messed up world.

She’d run quickly back to Chloe’s room to change into some clean clothes—luckily her cousin had already gotten up for the day so she avoided any awkward questions of where she’d disappeared to the previous night. Clark had gotten to the meeting before her, and was talking to Kara and a brunette woman she didn’t recognize. 

Chloe was seated at the head of the table, and called the meeting to order as soon as Lois had found a chair. Everyone turned to look at her and the free-standing corkboard behind her where she’d pinned a schematic of the tower.

“Two days ago, my cousin arrived from prior to the invasion, by way of a time travel device,” she announced. Everyone turned to look at Lois, who smiled a little awkwardly in return.

“Until now, we’ve avoided making any big moves against the tower, suspecting that the repercussions for anything less than a decisive and immediate victory would be too high of a price to pay. However, the availability of time travel has changed all of that. If we can bring back the yellow sun, Zod and his people will lose their powers, giving us the opening to steal back the Legion Ring and send Lois back to the past where she can rewrite history and prevent the apocalypse.”

‘But no pressure,’ Lois thought nervously as Chloe started outlining different plans of attack on the tower. 

“Why aren’t we including an aerial assault?” the woman near Clark asked. “We could destroy the control console from above.”

“Unfortunately, the pulses coming out of most of the Kandorian structures act like some kind of EMP; they’ll fry anything with an on-board computer built after about 1975, so all of our planes are grounded,” Oliver responded. Lois mouthed a silent “oh!” of comprehension. No wonder they’d mothballed all the nice new tech and gone back to relying on the old stuff. 

In hindsight, this base had been perfectly equipped to serve the rebels’ needs; while it had been up-to-date technologically, she remembered from her childhood that they’d packed up and stored a lot of old equipment for emergencies, including the old radios and the generator they were likely running off of. She and Lucy had used to explore the old storerooms when they were avoiding their homework. She herself had also spent plenty of hours in a 1960s flight simulator during her time here, imagining that she was up in the sky, taking out bad guys and saving the world. Her dad had been only too happy to plug the thing in every time they stayed here—it was an electronic babysitter and military training all rolled up into one clunky old machine. 

“The Kandorian forces can all fly,” Chloe continued, “and other than you, Shay, none of us currently have the ability. We’ll use the bombing of the power plant as a distraction,” she continued, turning back to the board. Lois licked her tongue across her teeth thoughtfully, then leaned sideways, motioning Oliver over.

“Is that old display piece still parked in the hangar?” she checked, a horrible idea beginning to take root in her mind. 

“The A-5 bomber? Yeah,” Oliver responded. “One of our mechanics even retrofitted it with Kryptonite weapons and defense systems when we first moved in here, but unfortunately none of our surviving pilots know how to fly anything that old, so it went back into retirement. They’ve been redoing all the electronics in my passenger jet so we can eventually use it again, but it’s not exactly a fighter plane.” Lois hummed thoughtfully, trying to return to paying attention to the briefing. It was a dumb idea anyway. 

“As I recall,” Oliver continued, not willing to drop it when she’d brought it up, “you weren’t a half bad pilot yourself.”

“Yeah, racing and trick flying,” Lois muttered back, the idea solidifying. “Not so much this kind of thing. But standard dogfighting skills wouldn’t work against these guys anyway. Trick flying, on the other hand...” she tilted her head to the side, pressing her lips together thoughtfully.

“Trick enough to lure them alien buggers in close?” another man asked, leaning forward and into their conversation. The faded nametag on his uniform read Col. Flag—now there was some good old American irony.

“Yeah, easy,” Lois nodded. “Just need something to get them to follow me in the first place…”

“Something you’d like to share with the class?” Chloe interrupted, and Lois realized uncomfortably that the whole group was staring right at them. 

“Oh God, I’m Luke Skywalker bragging about shooting whomp rats in a T-16,” she laughed breathlessly. She had 11% of a plan and no desire to pitch it right that second.

“I remember you trained on older styles of planes,” Chole prompted, her eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “And you always were one hell of a stunt flier.”

“Well,” Lois admitted, “you can’t use an air assault because these guys can also fly, so two planes, neither one properly equipped for battle, wouldn’t do much good. But thanks to the kryptonite defense systems, if any of them get too close, they’d be incapacitated. I was thinking that I could use those air show skills of mine to get their attention—give them something to worry about outside of the main assault, which they'll figure out is a distraction pretty quickly.”

“If you’re a stunt pilot, then you could fake a crash,” Shay realized out loud. “If you look like you’re spinning out of control and your weapons systems are offline, you could lure them within the range of the defenses.”

“Or get yourself killed,” Clark cut in immediately, his face a little green. “They’re faster than  _ bullets _ , Lois; you’re not going to outfly them.”

“Bet me,” Lois shot back.

“She could,” Kara agreed, and the speed at which Clark’s head whipped around to stare at her was almost comical. “I’ve seen her—your mom and I went to that airshow a few years ago that you said would make you puke. She’s incredible, and that’s coming from me.”

For a moment, Lois was distracted as the fact that Kara was also Kryptonian solidified in her brain; she was going through the same thing that Clark was. Perhaps she could even fly—or used to fly, before the invaders ruined the sun. 

“Just one of you wouldn’t be enough, even if you can do what they say,” Col. Flag sighed. He had the look of a once loud man made quiet by pain and time. 

“But depending on what they think I‘m doing, they might think I’m the thing they’re being distracted from,” Lois countered. The plan was forming, falling into place in her mind, and it was bad, really bad. Clark was going to hate it - she hated it already, and wished she hadn’t opened her mouth in the first place. She could feel the tension radiating off of him from the other end of the room, and he didn’t even know what she was suggesting yet.

“Director Sullivan,” a new voice cut in, and Chloe turned to look at the aide who’d just poked his head through the door, “the New York base is on the line for you.”

“We’ll reconvene later,” the blonde rebel leader announced, straightening her jacket and striding out the door.

“Shayera Hall,” Shay introduced herself properly as she followed Clark and Kara over to Lois, holding out her hand.

“Lois Lane,” Lois responded, holding up her splinted right apologetically.

“How long will it take you to heal to where you can do all that shit you just said?” Col. Flag asked, nodding at her injury.

“Three or four weeks, according to the doctors here,” Lois responded, both deflating and relaxing a little. If she couldn’t fly by the time they wanted to enact her plan, then she never had to discuss the whole of her idea with Clark.

But if the plan failed, if the Kryptonians suspected for even a second that the tower was their real target, then she was never getting home. She would never have the chance to go back and fix all of this. They needed a bigger, more intricate distraction. 

They needed her.

She just wished she was all that they needed.

-0-

When the meeting reconvened, Chloe’s only comment on the plan was to also ask about the heal time on Lois’s hand, and say that they wouldn’t be able to carry out another hit with the resources they had for at least the next two weeks regardless. Beyond that, she outlined the ground assault and then dismissed everyone. 

Avoiding Clark’s worried stare, Lois followed Oliver to the hangar, where he showed her what equipment they had to work with, and introduced her to a tall gruff mechanic with a head of short, tight grey curls. His name was Sinclair, and he’d retrofitted the A-5 Vigilante for use by the rebellion before being told to scrap the project. 

The irony of the model name was not lost on her.

He shook her hand, mentioned that he’d known her dad back in the day, and then walked her through the controls and the kryptonite enhancements. It was similar enough to the simulator she’d used as her personal arcade as a kid that she was confident she could fly it, even with the differences from the Zivko Edge in which she’d actually taken to the sky.

The Vigilante had originally been designed to carry a nuclear bomb, and to jettison a secondary fuel tank once it was empty; these two areas had made it easy for him to create a web of tubing that she could fill with radioactive-material-filled liquid, drain it back into the tank to remove it, and use an electric current in the line to increase the effectiveness and range of the defenses.

“So theoretically, I could quickly drop and remove the kryptonite mid-flight if necessary?” she asked, unsure of how the rest of her plan’s timing would work, but certain that she did not want to get this wrong.

“You can deactivate the radiant tubing and all of the liquid will be evacuated back into the lead containment unit at the back,” he nodded. “If the idea is to let them think you’re malfunctioning and then get in close, I’ve got you covered.”

“That too,” Lois nodded, “but if I hit the drop switch for the tank - I could use it as an improvised bomb, right?” she added as both Sinclair and Oliver looked at her skeptically. 

“I guess so,” the mechanic shrugged. “Don’t see why you’d want to though.”

“Thank you,” was all Lois gave him before turning to leave.

“Why would you need a kryptonite-free plane on short notice?” Oliver asked, keeping up with her. She glanced up at him, then shrugged innocently.

“Maybe so that Kara can take a victory lap with me after we kick Zod’s ass?” she suggested, knowing that it was a thin excuse. She didn’t want to discuss this with anyone until after Clark had agreed to it. Her blond ex didn’t force the subject—though he did change it to one that didn’t make her any more comfortable.

“You know Chloe will never approve this,” he reminded her. “She lost everyone she cared about in about a week—Jimmy, Clark, you… she won’t agree to a plan that puts you in the line of fire. Particularly since our whole prevent-the-apocalypse scheme only works if you live long enough to put on the ring and go back and stop it.”

“No, the plan only works if we get the ring and  _ someone  _ goes back to stop it,” Lois corrected, turning towards where she knew Chloe’s office lay. “You could do that, Chloe could do that, hell, Sinclair could do that. But what I can do, I don’t see anyone else holding a resume.”

“Yeah, they hit the air force pretty hard in the first wave,” Oliver sighed, scratching his head uncomfortably. “Operation Crimson Sky wasn’t just about sending up satellites; it was also about making sure nobody could interrupt them up there.”

When she was a kid, The General had always expected that she’d join the air force herself; her enthusiasm for flight had been one of the few things on which they’d really connected. He’d been deeply disappointed when after all the training she’d had as a teenager she’d refused to sign up as an adult, but even he couldn’t deny her reasoning. Despite everything he’d spent her life drilling into her, she didn’t have the temperament for the armed forces. 

Luckily for the continued survival of the world, she thought dryly; after all, if she hadn’t been in the right place and the right time to grab the ring… If she’d been on the force when the Kandorians turned up… If she hadn’t already known Clark Kent, hadn’t become someone he confided in, here at the end of all things… 

“Well, Mr. Archer,” she said aloud, not wanting to continue that train of thought. It scared her. It made her feel a little bit  _ too  _ important. “These were my skies before those sons of bitches got here—I think it’s high time I took them back.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guess what I did? I tried to write a sex scene for the very first time. (As in, the scene I’m about to post is my very first time, ever, writing a piece in which characters’ underwear come off “on screen,” ever in my life.) This story will remain rated T with the bedroom door closing before things get explicit. However, if you’d like to read my very, very inexpert attempt to write Clois Actually Doing The Smut™, you can find that in a fic titled Vigilante Skies: Layover. 
> 
> If my soul will stop trying to leave my body every time I think about repeating this experience, then I may continue to do so for other sex scenes from this fic. We’ll see.


	6. Wind Shear

Lois’s days began to fall into a pattern, an almost-normalcy setting in. Clark usually woke up first now that her nerves had calmed enough to get her sleep cycle off of farmer time, and she’d make her way to consciousness in the morning with his fingers running through her hair, listening to his heart beat under her ear. He always looked at her in those moments like he couldn’t believe she was really there, and in the few minutes before Kara would arrive to drag him away from her (knocking; she’d learned her lesson) they could forget the ruined world around them and just be together.

Shayera had drafted Clark into a hand-to-hand combat class she taught for the rebellion’s new recruits; since she was close with Kara, she knew what it was like for a Kryptonian to suddenly have to learn a new, non-powered fighting style, and trained Clark accordingly. Lois’s mornings were spent alternately with Chloe and Baldwin, going over modern history and the chain of events leading to the apocalypse, so that when she got back to the past, she’d know exactly how to stop it.

“It should really be you going,” she’d told Chloe after one of the lessons, which she really did try to focus on, despite her dislike of long meetings and learning from lectures. “You understand all of this more than I ever will.”

“It has to be you,” Chloe countered softly, “because I know we’ll all listen to you. Clark and I haven’t been on speaking terms in long enough that I can’t trust him to have my back when it matters. I’m not basing the survival of our world on the hope that he’ll suddenly come around. 

“You on the other hand,” she smiled, and it was only a tiny bit brittle, “have him wrapped around your little finger.” She hadn’t said anything about Lois moving out of her room just as soon as she’d moved in, and always sent Baldwin to come and get her if she was needed after hours. 

The walls she’d put up between herself and Clark weren’t going to come down any time soon.

In the afternoons, everyone who wasn’t on the combat list for the week divided up various chores around the base. Lois was put on light duty and instructed not to do anything that would compromise the healing of her hand - as time passed and the plan of attack on the tower solidified, it was becoming more and more evident that it was going to hinge on her flying. Shay was going to be up there with her, using the sun as camouflage to assist by sniping from a distance. 

They’d rigged Oliver’s passenger jet as a bomber, planning on using it to aid the destruction of a nearby factory. Lois tried not to think about the high likelihood that that was a suicide mission. She was going to go back and change history; everyone who died getting her there would come back.

Telling herself that didn’t make it any easier.

Heroes had always been an obsession of hers, but until The Blur came along, Lois had always thought that meant the men and women who signed up to protect others as their job - armed forces, firefighters, healthcare workers and the like. 

But being part of the rebellion meant that she was constantly rubbing shoulders with people who’d stood up all on their own, not because it was their job or because they’d weighed all the pros and cons and decided that this was a wise path, but because it was the right thing to do, because they loved their home and believed it was worth defending, even when the situation looked impossible. 

She started keeping a journal, in a little foil-covered cassette recorder that Chloe had found and EMP-proofed for her, documenting her experiences and interviewing each rebel who would talk to her, asking them what inspired them to push back and keep fighting despite impossible odds. For some, it was anger at seeing a familiar place or thing destroyed. For others, it was because they wanted their children to grow up into a better world. 

So many people had fled to the human designated zones, but so many more hadn’t, or had gone but still supported the rebellion from a distance with supplies, information and anything else they needed. In the last days of the world, humanity had risen up and shown the best of itself, and Lois couldn’t feel anything but privileged to have seen it.

Chloe featured in quite a few of those stories, though she wouldn’t stand still long enough for Lois to interview her herself. She hadn’t just become the leader of the rebellion because she’d had Watchtower or Oliver standing behind her or military contacts or any other gimmicks. When the chips were down, she had a power all her own of inspiring people, and bringing out the best in them. She was their leader because people believed in her, and they did so because she’d first believed in them. Stories about how she’d infiltrated work camps alone, walked the scorched earth looking for survivors, convinced factions warring for scraps to band together, filled a box of mismatched cassettes, and Lois was exploding with pride for her cousin and what she’d become.

That was a big part of what made Clark into The Blur too, she realized, reading between the lines of his own stories. Sure, he’d always had a heroic streak, but she’d come to realize that those streaks only come out when there’s someone to be that first person who believes. Chloe had been that for Clark before anyone else. It hurt Lois’s heart to watch how cold she was to him now. 

“Give her time,” he always said when she’d bring it up. “I turned my back on humanity during the greatest tragedy of her life, and wasn’t there for her when she needed me. That’s going to take her some time to process.” 

“Step one when I get back to the past is going to be to get you two in a room together to talk out your issues before they get this far,” Lois muttered.

“Step one should probably be telling me to get my head out of my ass,” Clark countered. “And remind me that my birth father isn’t always right about things. I may be Kryptonian, but culturally I’m human, and I shouldn’t turn my back on everything I was raised with just because it’s not my blood birthright.”

Clark really was both night owl and early bird; due to its unusual orbit, Kryptonian daytime was much longer than their night time, and the people’s circadian rhythms had evolved accordingly. Even with his powers gone, he wasn’t technically human, and only slept for a few hours at a time. Some nights she’d feel him getting up, kissing the top of her head, and quietly leaving the room, reappearing in the morning when she woke up, laying next to her fully clothed like he’d only just come in.

Other nights she’d stay up with him - he tried to teach her how to bake cookies in what was once the officers’ lounge, now communal kitchen, and laughed so hard he snorted at the impossibly dismal failures she produced. His came out perfectly, of course, and she couldn’t stay annoyed while she was eating them. 

He told her more stories, the real stories of his double-life that she’d always been on the periphery of—and sometimes smack dab in the middle without a clue of what was happening around her. That rankled her, knowing that there was so much she hadn’t known, and knowing that at the end of the road they were on, she’d be going back to the version of him who had hidden so many things from her. 

She tried not to think about that part too, but it kept popping into her mind. With each passing moment - moments spent with Clark, moments spent slowly getting Chloe to open up to her again, moments spent meeting the other rebels and hearing their stories - this world for all of its darkness felt more real, and the world she’d left behind felt more like a half-forgotten dream. 

She never doubted that going back was the right thing to do; that was how she was going to save everybody, after all. But as she fell asleep cuddled into Clark’s chest, her last thought each night began to be the ever-growing realization of how much that was going to hurt.

-0-

Two weeks after their rescue, and halfway through Lois’s healing, Oliver admitted to her that he had an inside man, someone reporting to him on the Kandorians’ movements from right in the middle of their organization. He tended to keep that between himself, Chloe and the wall, never being 100% sure that they didn’t have an information leak, but at a carefully impromptu-seeming meeting between himself, Chloe, Lois and Clark and a handful of others, he explained that his informant had sent him big news the previous night.

“They’re moving precious cargo, a scientist who they believe can genetically reengineer them to have their powers even if the tower were to be compromised,” he announced. “They’re moving him from where they’ve hidden him until now to one of LuthorCorp’s labs where he can work on a serum to correct what Jor-El originally did to their genetics to rob them of their powers.

“We can’t let that caravan reach its destination,” Clark surmised, looking at the route that Oliver had drawn out on Chloe’s wipe-off board. Lois was too busy being glad that Chloe had let him back into her trusted circle that it took her a beat too long to realize what he was saying. “I need to be with the extraction team,” he continued. “I may not have my powers but my presence would distract the Kandorians enough for the rest of you to get in and get out.”

Lois swallowed, her good fist tight. She couldn’t argue with that—she’d thought the same thing not too long ago. But the difference was, in her plan, his continued survival depended solely on her undeniable skills in the air, not his very new fighting basics training and a few nights spent beating up a bag in the gym when his sleep schedule didn’t align with hers.

“Agreed,” Chloe said, her voice tight and controlled. “We’ll fit you out with Kryptonite defensive weapons; don’t draw until they get within range, or they’ll stay back and use their heat vision and arctic breath.”

“I know how it works, Chloe,” he admonished, his eyebrows rising a little as he tilted his head the way he always did when reminding someone of something they already knew.

“You’re not usually on this end of it,” she reminded him in turn, keeping her eyes fixed on the map as she started to outline their plan of attack. The walls were clearly still up.

Lois didn’t have a leg to stand on when they told her she couldn’t come with. Healing her hand so she could go save the world took precedence, and as much as she hated that, she understood it. That evening when she would have normally been settling in with Clark in their room, she was fiddling with the buckles on the uniform they’d lent him while they waited for the rest of the unit to assemble. Most of them had no idea what they were walking into, and wouldn’t be briefed until they were en route to protect the inside man. 

“Lois, I’m going to be fine,” Clark assured her for what had to be the fiftieth time that day.

“I know you will,” she responded, finally deciding there was nothing left for her to fix on him. “And I know this because if you’re not fine,” she added, looking up at him and jabbing a finger into his chest, “I will march right down into the afterlife and kick your ass myself. Understood?” He grabbed her hand and kissed it.

“Loud and clear,” he responded with a little smirk. “I’ll be back by morning.”

“We’re ready to move out,” Oliver announced, sticking his head in the door. Clark leaned down and kissed her briefly before following the blond archer out. Watching him leave, Lois was reminded of all the times she watched as her dad left on deployment when she was little, and the way her mom would keep it together in front of him. After the door had closed behind him, however, she’d go pale and her hands would shake, and sometimes Lois had had the impression that if she’d gone over to speak with her then, she might break into a thousand pieces.

She remembered thinking that she never wanted that, in a relationship. She wanted a man who kept his world safe and stable and she’d never need to worry about him. Soldiers and various bad boys were fun to look at and made for great casual fun, but the idea of spending a life with someone who could be taken from her at any moment had scared her. 

She’d broken up with Oliver because she knew that if she let herself get close to him, really close, close enough to get hurt, that someday she’d be waiting up for him and instead it would be the police knocking on the door to tell her they’d found his body in the middle of his latest heroics. She hadn’t let herself fall in love with him; not really.

With Clark, she realized as she stared at his empty side of the bed, it was already far too late to stop. 

She shook herself a little, pulling off her brace and stretching her fingers as the doctor had shown her. She was massively overthinking this. The unit had kryptonite weapons and insider knowledge. Clark would be back in the morning.

-0-

Clark wasn’t back in the morning.


	7. Urgent Condition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter specific tw in endnote

Lois woke up alone for the first time since landing in this broken world; even when it was clear he’d been up all night, he’d always come to bed for a while in the morning to lay with her and be at peace, as he put it. She rolled over, feeling his side for any residual warmth and finding none. 

Taking a deep breath, she sat up and reached for her pants, reminding herself firmly that any number of totally safe and mundane things could have contributed to his lateness. Him not being there could mean that the team had needed to stop off somewhere and free some more slaves, or that the truck had gotten a flat and they needed to change it, or he could be back already but giving Chloe a report, or he was off with the liberated scientist being a super nerd about whatever awesome plan the guy might have concocted to take the Kandorians down.

She went to breakfast, eating on autopilot. She went to her daily meeting with Chloe, noticing the dark circles under her cousin’s eyes without comment. She tried to focus on the material they were going over, and even succeeded for a few minutes.

Clark wasn’t back by lunch. 

Chloe sent out scouts as soon as the meal ended. Hours passed and they returned without him. All forensic evidence from the interception site showed that a fight had taken place as planned; two bodies were recovered and returned to their families for burial. Lois had interviewed one of them just last week; she made a copy of the recording to give to the dead woman’s husband if he ever wanted it, then spent so long debating whether to give it to him right away or wait that she missed dinner. 

The scouts hadn’t seen any sign of which way the survivors had gone, and Baldwin said it wasn’t safe to try to contact Oliver’s inside man so soon after the attack to find out if they’d been captured. Another search party left into the fast darkening night.

Sunset brought the same bone-numbing cold as always, and Lois tossed and turned in bed wrapped in every blanket she could find and two of Clark’s flannel shirts, unable to get warm. She hoped savagely that wherever Tess Mercer was sleeping, that she was damn cold too. How was any of this nightmare good for the environment anyway?

Giving up on sleep, she pulled her clothes back on, adding one of the flannels on top, and made her way to the hanger. Finding a pencil and a tin of yellow paint, she carefully drew out the words “Game On” onto the nose of the plane, then began painting them in. 

She’d been getting really good with her right hand over the past few weeks, skills that would probably serve her well even after she was healed. Maybe it would improve her typing speed once she returned to the beautiful normalcy of the Daily Planet. Maybe her need to record rather than take notes on conversations would help her exercise her memory when she returned to work. 

Maybe she was grasping at straws to find a glimmer of light in this dark night of the soul.

She closed her eyes, leaning her head against the cold hull of the aircraft and closing her eyes, breathing in the smell of metal and paint and machine oil and trying to let it take her back to a simpler time. These things should smell like home.

All she could smell was him, his shirt wrapped around her like she was a damn kid with a security blanket. He smelled like home. Her throat felt tight, too tight, she didn’t want to cry… 

“Lois?”

The paintbrush fell from her nerveless fingers and she jumped so haphazardly off the ladder she’d been sitting on that it was a miracle she didn’t break an ankle.

His face and uniform were grimy, and he was listing slightly to the side like he was trying not to cradle an injury; he had more cuts on his face than when he’d left, and his hair was the messiest she’d ever seen it. She stopped short of slamming into him, but he closed the distance and scooped her up into his arms, holding her like she was the one who’d been gone for far too long.

She’d meant to yell at him for worrying her, or maybe to ask if he was okay, or maybe just to gasp out his name, but all she could do was sob uncontrollably into his shoulder. He held onto her, anchoring her as she fell apart, until she could take a full breath and get words past her lips.

“What happened?” she finally asked, her voice coming out in a hideous croak.

“It was a trap,” he responded. “The scientist… was Kryptonian. He’s been experimenting on ways to make us immune to the radiation of pieces of our homeworld, and one of his experiments was partially successful. The Kandorian soldiers can take these pills and have a couple of hours where kryptonite has no effect on them - although he says the side effects are brutal afterwards.”

“He says?” Lois echoed.

“Yeah,” Clark answered the unspoken question, “we got him out. It took longer than we expected, and Shereen and Daniel…” he cut off, emotion choking him as he brought up the two dead rebels.

“Clark,” Oliver’s voice interrupted, and Lois let go long enough to hug him too. He squeezed her back for a long moment. “Hey Lo,” he greeted her. “You need to take him to medical—he slipped away before Emil could get a look at him.”

“I’m fine,” Clark started, but Oliver cut him off.

“Don’t give me that big guy,” he said, shaking his head, “you look like you had an impromptu meeting with a meat tenderizer, and I know broken ribs when I see them.”

“We’re on our way,” Lois assured him dryly.

“Game On?” Oliver read, looking over at her handiwork. She smirked.

“I was gonna call it the Up Yours,” she admitted, “but Chloe vetoed. Have you two talked to her yet?” she added, realizing that her cousin was conspicuously missing from this happy reunion.

“My next stop,” Oliver responded. “And yours…” he added pointedly in Clark’s direction.

“Is medical, I heard you the first time,” the alien groused, interlacing his fingers with Lois’s and letting her pull him gently down the hallway.

Clark’s ribs were bruised, but luckily not broken. Emil had to stitch him up in a couple of places, commending whoever had field dressed the wounds for their excellent handiwork. 

“Yeah, that would be the alien scientist,” Col. Flag responded when he overheard that comment. Another medic was carefully removing the impromptu splint around his leg. “I was sure the martian bugger was going to turn on us as soon as Clark got those kryptonite cuffs off of him, but he set my knee in about a second, patched up Clark and Oliver and found us the storm cellar of a burned down house to lay low in while the sun was up. Still can’t figure out how he knew it was down there.”

“X-Ray vision,” Emil supplied helpfully.

“X-Ray vision?” Lois mouthed at Clark who nodded and shrugged, then winced as the movement aggravated his injuries.

“Take two of these every six hours,” the doctor instructed, handing him a bottle with a few pain pills in it. “And don’t rip those stitches; if I have to put a needle into you again tomorrow because you pushed it, I’ll embroider you closed in a pattern of my choosing.”

“I won't,” Clark promised with a smirk. Although his face was cut up and bruised, his smile had some of its old light back and Lois felt an incredible warmth inside seeing it.

“How’s the knee, Colonel?” an unfamiliar accented voice asked, and Lois glanced over her shoulder to see that Chloe and Oliver had entered, along with an older man with a shock of messy white hair and the most beautiful green eyes she’d ever seen one anyone, except for— 

“They said it’ll heal up good as new, thanks to you Jor-El,” Flag responded, reaching up and shaking the man’s hand. Lois blinked, swallowed, took a deep breath. She knew that name. It belonged to a long dead man, whose voice Clark could sometimes hear in the learning AI in his fortress of solitude. She’d never expected to meet him in the flesh.

“Jor-El,” Clark greeted his father, voice carefully controlled in a way that it hadn’t been since Lois had found him in this destroyed world. The man turned to face them. “I’d like you to meet Lois.”

“Hi,” she breathed out, shaking his hand and noting the firm grip, and how much it reminded her of Clark. They looked impressively alike, a piece of trivia that she vaguely remembered Chloe telling her, back before she knew the whole story.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” Jor-El responded. “We had quite a bit of time to kill yesterday, so Ka—”

“Clark,” Chloe interrupted abruptly, cutting off Clark’s kryptonian name before it could sound incriminating, “I need to debrief you. My office please.” For a moment there, Lois had forgotten that Clark’s secret was, well, secret. Apparently so had Jor-El, who didn’t attempt to speak again.

“I’ll meet you back in our room,” Clark muttered into Lois’s hair as he hugged her loosely, then walked past Jor-El to follow Chloe out. 

“Why don’t you show our newest guest to one of the empty rooms?” Oliver suggested. “There are some in the south corridor that haven’t been used yet.” 

While she’d ordinarily hate being asked to play errand girl, Lois was more than happy for the chance to talk to Clark’s birth father—besides which, she couldn’t imagine that anyone other than the team he’d saved would be terribly comfortable around one of the kryptonians they’d come to hate and fear. 

“This way,” she said, turning to head out the door. He followed her out, and after it had shut behind him, she added, “I never thought I’d get the chance to meet you in person—what with you being, well…”

“Dead?” Jor-El supplied lightly. “Yes, that would normally be the major factor. However, when the council demanded that I finish the cloning project, they instructed me to include my own genetic pattern in the capsule. I was reborn at the same time as the Kandorian battalion.”

“And you found a way to make your guys immune to kryptonite?” she checked.

“Not my guys,” he corrected softly. “It wasn’t ready for live trials yet,” he added, shaking his head sadly. “I had only hoped that we could bear to be near pieces of our homeworld without suffering pain and weakness. But Zod’s desire for power pushed my research faster than it ought to have gone. Luckily they’ve used up all of my prototype doses as of last night.”

“Still,” Lois mused, “it would be great if you could find a way for Clark to be around the stuff, once we fix up the sun.”

“You’re terribly optimistic about that plan, or so my son tells me,” the scientist commented, one bushy eyebrow crooking upwards. 

“I’m a terribly good pilot,” she countered. “Just ask your niece—she thinks I can pull it off.”

“Kara’s fatal flaw has always been her desire to have faith in those around her,” Jor-El responded, and there was the perpetually disappointed father that Clark had described. “I had hoped that Kal-El wouldn’t fall too far under her influence.” 

“Well personally, I think she has the right idea,” Lois said coolly. “Though Clark did mention that trust issues run in the family.”

“Did he now?” Jor-El asked, turning to face her properly.

“Yeah,” Lois continued, entering the south corridor and stopping at the door to an unused room. “I think he forgot to mention that heroism is also something he inherited though,” she added. “Thank you for bringing them back safely.”

“And thank you,” the tall alien responded after a thoughtful pause. “If for nothing else, than for putting that look on my boy’s face.”

“What look?” Lois asked, frowning, thinking sadly of Clark’s lost smile.

“The one he gets when he talks about you,” he said with a small smile of his own, before opening the door and entering the room.

-0-

Lois made it all of 10 minutes sitting up in bed and waiting for Clark to get back before it started to feel too much like the last two nights. She left his shirt behind this time, a little embarrassed to have been caught wearing it by pretty much everyone she knew, and walked slowly back in the direction of Chloe’s office, chafing her arms with her hands and regretting not digging up a hoodie. She figured it couldn’t take too long for a debriefing between two people who still basically weren’t talking, and she’d run into him on his way back. However, she arrived at the office door without seeing either of them.

The door was ajar, and she approached quietly, peering through the crack.

The scene confused her for a minute—it looked like Clark was trying to hug Chloe, while she struggled futilely against him, muffled screams ripping themselves out of her as her fists thumped weakly at his upper arms. What little of her face Lois could see was red and streaked with tears—oh, she realized after a few seconds, taking a quiet step back and out of the line of sight. There was the breakdown that she would have expected of someone who’d kept it together as long as Chloe had.

“That’s the first time she’s really showed emotion since she lost everyone she loved last year,” Oliver whispered as she backed into his space without noticing him. They both took a few steps away to give the other two some privacy. “I guess the thought that she might have lost him again today pushed her over the edge.”

“She didn’t lose you though,” Lois countered, looking up at him thoughtfully. Jimmy had died, she’d disappeared and Clark had severed his human ties, but from what she’d gathered, Oliver had stood by Chloe through hell and high water. 

He smiled sadly in the direction of the office door, running a hand through his permanently rumpled hair, and then shook his head.

“I don’t count,” he whispered. “Not like the rest of you do.” 

He turned and walked away before Lois had the chance to process that or think of how to protest it. She exhaled slowly, pressing the heels of her hands to her forehead. On her mental list of things to change about the future, doing something about Ollie’s dismal self-esteem was starting to rank highly. How could he think that he was any less important to Chloe than the rest of them?

How was she ever going to fix everything that she needed to fix?

The extent of what she was going to try to do hit her for the first time, stealing the air from her lungs. She found herself crouching in the hallway fighting to breathe, fighting to keep quiet because the last things she wanted to do was interrupt what was going on between her cousin and her lover, and the second to last thing she wanted was to have to explain how she wound up like this.

Luckily Chloe’s emotions overwhelmed her longer than Lois’s. After a few minutes she judged she could get upright and make it back to her room; she got through the door, but collapsed against it, sliding down to the floor as she tried to breathe evenly.

In a countable number of days, they were going to get the ring back. She was going to reappear in a younger, kinder world, full of people who hadn’t lived through the apocalypse yet, and she was going to have to convince some of them to believe her that it had happened. She was going to go back to a version of Clark who didn’t love her yet, who was in the middle of trying to turn his back on everything and everyone, a version of Chloe whose grief and anger were new and fresh, a version of Oliver who was much the same as he was now because it turned out he’d always felt a little like the world was ending around him and he had no one to lean on.

“Step one,” she whispered to herself, “stop Tess from bringing the Kandorians here. After that, I have all the time in the world to handle the rest.”

-0-

“Lois?” The feeling of the door trying to open behind her startled her out of the half-doze she’d fallen into before Clark spoke, and she scrambled to her feet, getting out of the way so he could enter. He’d showered; his hair was still wet.

“You okay?” he asked, concern creasing his face as he reached up a hand to touch her cheek. She couldn’t feel from the inside what she looked like, but she guessed it couldn’t be good.

“How’s Chloe?” she deflected. 

“I think all of this has been weighing on her more than she wants to admit,” he responded, sitting down on the bed and pulling off his boots. “No one can carry the weight of the world all on their own—we both learned that the hard way this year.” Lois hummed in agreement, helping him peel off his tee-shirt without aggravating his stitches.

“You didn’t answer me,” he added as he got the rest of his clothes off and slid into bed. Lois stripped quickly of everything but her camisole and underwear and curled up next to him. 

“No I didn’t,” she agreed quietly.

“Which is very unlike you,” Clark prompted, his eyebrows both rising, waiting for an answer that she’d normally just blurt out with no trouble.

“It’s just hitting me now, how much there is to do when I go back,” she whispered. “You and Chloe won’t have a year to come to terms with the whole ‘no one is an island’ thing; I still don’t know nearly enough about how Tess’s diabolical plans went down, and there’s all this complicated alien stuff happening in the background, and I’m just one human.”

“Hey,” Clark murmured, pulling her into him. She pressed her face into his shoulder, closing her eyes, determined not to cry again. “You’re going to start by finding me and Chloe and Oliver, and telling us what happens. You don’t have to do any of this alone, and no one expects you to, okay?”

“And what if one or all of you won’t listen to me?” she asked, voice barely making a sound against his skin. “The you in the past isn’t the one who spent a year missing me.” She pulled away just slightly to look him in the eyes. “What if you—he…” 

“Lois,” Clark cut her off firmly. “We haven’t always loved each other,” he winced as he said that, clearly thinking along the same lines as she was. “And we haven’t always trusted each other. But there is no moment in my life where if you arrived and said you needed my help to save the world that I wouldn’t listen to you. And by the time you left for the future…” he swallowed hard, then kissed her gently. 

“I wasn’t ready to admit it out loud back then,” he continued, resting his forehead against hers. “All I could think about was the way my love for Lana made her a target for years of her life, even when we weren’t together; how she was taken from me, and how scared I was of going through that again.”

“And then I disappeared,” Lois finished for him. She felt him nod.

“I knew how I felt about you,” he assured her. “You’re not going back to a past where I don’t love you, Lois. Just one where I’m really terrible at showing it. And I promise you,” here he pulled away again, eyes burning into hers, “even when I’m my younger self, too caught up in my own head to work all of that out, I will always be there for you when you need me.”

“You always know the right thing to say, Smallville,” she murmured, kissing him, first gently, then with passion building between them as it always did these days. She deliberately tried not to think of the way that flames flared the brightest just as they went out.

“Emil said you’re not supposed to do anything strenuous,” she panted as his fingers hooked into the waistband of her panties. He paused, looking up at her in a lust-filled haze of confusion. She smirked, hooking a leg firmly over his hip and shifting her weight so that he was laying on his back. 

“Pretty sure that means I get to be on top,” she added, her teeth grazing his earlobe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: this chapter contains a character having an anxiety attack; it’s briefly and non-explicitly described (basically just some breathing issues)


	8. Turbulence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi folks, it's been a while!  
> Chapter-specific tw in endnote

“This is Lois Lane, Daily Planet, recording interview number 43 with Jor-El. Jor-El is a scientist from the planet krypton, recently arrived on earth as a captive of the Kandorian invasion force.” Lois set the tape recorder on the table between them, hyper aware of Clark sitting beside her. 

Over the past three days, he’d tried to have a number of conversations with his father, get to know the man as a man, and not just a fancy AI nanny cam in an ice fortress in Antarctica. All of them had ended either with one of them making an excuse and hurrying off, or with them getting into a shouting match. They may have looked alike (and a great deal more alike when Jor-El was younger, according to Clark) but their personalities were like gasoline and a match. Jor-El valued tradition and decisiveness and self-sufficiency to uphold the public good; Clark valued individual people and their choices and ability to grow and change, and couldn’t fathom choosing between the good of the many and the good of the one. 

Lois supposed it was a difference in their cultures—Clark’s values were very red-blooded American when she stopped to think about it. Jor-El, for his part, was trying to understand and respect his son, but was also terribly set in his ways. In addition to the clear differences between them, Clark couldn’t help but blame him for endorsing his plan to cut his ties with humanity—an act that led directly to his being unable to stop the Kandorian invasion. However, he also couldn’t really bring that up with the younger, cloned version of Jor-El, because while his values might be the same, “he” hadn’t actually done that. The whole situation made for an unavoidably toxic environment between them.

She’d invited Jor-El to do an interview with her after lunch, and suggested Clark come along and listen.

“Maybe having another person in the mix might help you break the ice,” she’d said, and he’d sighed and told her that at this point he didn’t hold out much hope. He’d turned up though, sitting next to her, opposite Jor-El at the end of one of the metal dining tables, his well-muscled arms crossed across his chest in a way that would have been really distracting if she hadn’t been so focused. (Later, Lois!)

“Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today,” she continued. 

“You’re quite welcome,” Jor-El responded immediately, his hands folded on the table in front of him. He had a habit of keeping them together, and it made her wonder in her darker moments how long he’d been kept in those restraints. 

“Let’s start with the basics. You and the other Kryptonians are clones created from your DNA placed in the orb Tess Mercer had. When she activated it, you all appeared here. However, our sources say that you’ve been openly in opposition to Zod and his agenda from day one. Why?”

“Zod’s desire to play God has always been dangerous,” the man responded immediately. “When he was in the military, it served him well, allowing him to do more and push further and accomplish great things. However in peacetime, he never lost the intensity that came with his command and the responsibilities involved with it. 

“It was only a matter of time before he decided that there was something that needed changing, or someone, and well…” he lifted his hands to gesture around him before folding them again. “You’ve seen the results of that.”

“Jor-El, you’ve mentioned you don’t have any memories beyond your visible age,” Lois started again, treading carefully, mindful of Clark beside her. He’d kept his word and hadn’t said anything—hadn’t even twitched, actually. “That means, if I’m understanding you correctly, that you don’t remember Clark being born, or choosing to send him here to Earth.”

“That’s correct,” the older alien responded with a nod. His eyes flickered briefly to Clark’s, then back to hers.

“But prior to your current age, you had been to Earth and formed an impression of us, is that correct?” He nodded again. “Can you tell me about that?”

Clark had already told her the story - what of it he’d learned from Jor-El’s memories and his investigation into Lana’s dead great aunt. But she wanted to know how Jor-El himself remembered it, remembered meeting Hyram Kent, remembered the love he’d shared with Louise, and the heartbreak at losing her. And she wanted Clark to know what his father remembered and that he wasn’t alone in loving humanity, even if Jor-El prioritized his Kryptonian roots over them.

“It was popular among the ruling class on Krypton to send their children off-world as part of a coming-of-age ritual,” Jor-El began, his eyes guarded. “My father selected Earth because—”

“Lois, Clark!” Baldwin interrupted, rushing into the room. “You’re needed in command, now!”

Three heads whipped up to look at him in confusion; he’d already turned and run back off, the door swinging shut behind him. Lois grabbed her tape recorder and all three set off for Chloe’s office, shouldering in along with a small crowd as the blonde rebel leader turned up the volume on the little tube TV mounted to the wall. 

“Zod hasn’t made a live broadcast to humanity in months,” she explained as Lois looked at her in confusion. “Normally every station just plays propaganda videos on loop unless we hijack them—but this one’s new.”

The camera was set up on the roof of the Daily Planet, the gold sculpture reflecting the red light down so intensely that the scene looked like it was awash with blood. Zod and some of his minions stood in the shot, the general a few steps further forward than his men. 

Lois shifted forward, setting the recorder down near the TV’s speakers and hitting the button combination to record whatever was about to happen.

“Three days ago, rebel scum stole something from me,” Zod was announcing. “Though I have by my grace allowed so many of you stinking humans to continue to live, though I have not exterminated all who opposed me despite it being well within my power to do so, you still felt the need to force my hand.” 

Someone was making muffled noises of protest just off camera. Beside Chloe, Oliver had gone terribly white, his fists clenched painfully tight and his jaw set.

“These vermin were aided by one of their own—one who we once deigned to call our ally,” Zod growled, and Lois felt a white-hot flash of terror run down her spine as a struggling female form was pulled into the shot, a black bag over her head.

It didn’t matter. There was really only one person it could be.

As the general removed the cloth covering Tess’s face, she spat right into his, earning her a punch to the gut from one the soldiers holding her. Zod wiped his face methodically, then whirled in an instant to wrap one hand around the woman’s neck. He lifted her into the air, her feet kicking uselessly at nothing as she clawed futilely at his hold.

“It is the universal truth of betrayal that it always comes from someone who was once trusted,” he monologued as Tess’s face got redder and redder, eyes widening in terror and desperation.

“Tess Mercer has been found guilty of treason against the rule of Zod!” he bellowed. The kicking and struggling was slowing down. Lois eased forward to put an arm around Oliver, who had started to hyperventilate. She wondered soberly how long Tess had been his “inside man.” 

How long did it take for a marine biologist to realize that she’d destroyed the world she’d meant to protect?

Tess hung limply in Zod’s grip, and he tossed her lifeless body off to the side in an ungainly heap.

“You will all kneel before the power of Zod,” he seethed, and the video cut off, the screen going black for a moment before the familiar propaganda video took its place. Chloe fumbled with the dials with nerveless fingers for several seconds before managing to twist them to the “off” position.

Oliver seemed to wake up then, shaking her off in a rough spasm of movement before turning and running from the room. Getting her balance back with Clark’s steadying arm around her for help, she turned to follow him, but Chloe was already halfway out the door.

“Let me,” she called over her shoulder before vanishing as well. 

Lois reached forward, stopping the recording. She wondered if she should erase it. It felt voyeuristic, keeping a record of the sounds Tess had made in her last moments. But it was also part of her record of what had happened here, which she’d been thinking for a long time it was her responsibility to preserve, even when this time was wiped out. She ran her fingers over the recorder, thoughts spinning.

Everyone trickled away after that, wandering aimlessly in different directions, their hushed conversational topics all about the same; Tess had betrayed the world, which was a shame, and had died trying to save it, and no one could quite agree one which of those two things was worse. Jor-El had slipped off somewhere, which was probably a good thing in a building full of people mourning a human killed by Kryptonians. She’d have to try the interview thing again another day.

“You know, it always used to annoy me, how many chances you’d give people,” she commented to Clark, who looked down at her with that disarmed look he’d sometimes get when he sensed she might be giving him a compliment disguised as an insult. “Especially when they hurt you, and it seemed like you were letting them.”

“Tess shouldn’t have had to die for hers,” he said, voice quiet and rough. Lois nodded, wrapping her arms around him and resting her head on his chest.

“No,” she agreed softly. “No she shouldn’t have.”

-0-

“This is Lois Lane, Daily Planet,” Lois began, “recording interview number 44 with Clark Kent. Clark is a Kryptonian, biological son of Jor-El, raised here on Earth in Smallville, Kansas, also the vigilante known as The Blur, and currently a member of the resistance against general Zod.” 

She swallowed, setting the tape recorder down on the bed between them. It shocked her that she’d said all of that out loud, that he’d sat across from her, his eyes never leaving hers, while she’d said and recorded it. After what happened to Tess, he’d been terribly quiet for the rest of the day, until that evening when he’d suddenly announced that he wanted to do an interview. 

“Until now, you’ve been very private about yourself and what you do,” she continued, crossing her legs and leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “You wouldn’t let me interview you as The Blur, or now as part of my Hero Within series. What changed your mind?”

“After what happened to Tess,” he responded, “I realized that there are some things that I’m thinking and feeling about the world and my place in it, and I wanted to make sure that no matter what happens, even after you go back and change everything that happened here… after you change  _ me _ ,” he amended, his eyes burning into hers, “that those thoughts wouldn’t be lost to time.” 

“The theme of this interview series, The Hero Within, is the inspiration I feel rubbing shoulders every day with so many people who are putting their lives on the line here in the rebellion to fight for what they believe in,” Lois continued. “But you’ve actually been doing that for years; as a kid in Smallville, in your time as The Blur in Metropolis, and now what you’re doing here. 

“Tell me Clark, what inspires you to be the hero?”

“At first I was just trying to keep the people I loved safe,” he explained. “I had the power to run faster, lift more, hear trouble before anyone got hurt. My parents—that is, my human parents,” he amended, a shadow briefly crossing his face, “raised me to value my community and to do my part—sometimes as a hero, sometimes just as a friendly ear—to protect it. Growing up on a farm in Smallville Kansas, I guess I didn’t need any particular inspiration to keep the people around me safe. And… it wasn’t hard, really, back then. I was practically invincible, so I just sort of did what I did.

“The stakes got higher as I got older and more extraterrestrial people and things arrived on Earth. Relationships with others got more complicated as I hid more and more from them—Chloe finding out when she did was terrifying at first, but ultimately a godsend. I know more than half of your interviews cite her as people’s inspiration, and she was one of mine, too. Chloe has always believed that people are capable of extraordinary things. I think the fact that she believed in me, even before she knew my secret, even when she knew but was waiting for me to decide to tell her on my own, is what helped me to believe in myself, even when things seemed bleak.

“It’s easy to say that since I have the power to protect people that I have an obligation to do so—this is popular rhetoric from my birth parents as well,” he added a little sourly. “They sent me here with the thought that I would be a god-like figure, but with my background and upbringing I could never see myself being that. But I remember discovering that Oliver, an otherwise normal human guy, had seen problems in the world and dedicated himself to solving them, at great risk to himself, and I had this moment of realizing that no matter how bulletproof I was, no matter how many people I pulled out of burning buildings or how many car wrecks I stopped, I’d never be half the hero that he is. 

“If you ever show him this,” he growled suddenly, as if realizing for the first time that the recording could and probably would be played back. Lois dissolved into laughter. 

“You don’t want him to know what you really think of him?” she checked, getting her laughter under control.

“It’ll go straight to his head and he’ll never let younger me hear the end of it,” he groused, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and index finger. “Eh, on second thought you may as well show it to him. He’s been pretty down, and that started before the invasion. Embarrassing or not, he should know that people believe in him too.” He fell silent then, face crumpling a little. Lois could sense that he had more to say on that, and didn’t break the quiet, letting him get his thoughts in order.

“Me, if you’re listening,” he finally began, looking quickly over to her. She nodded, agreeing to his unspoken request to deliver this message to his younger self. “Right now, you’re feeling like you’ve lost everything that ties you to your human life, and because you’ve spent your life mostly invincible, getting hurt is a new and difficult thing for you to deal with. You’re considering cutting off your remaining relationships, believing that your presence only causes pain for the people you care about, and knowing underneath that you’ll be the one in pain if they leave you first. 

“ _ Don’t _ .” 

He twisted his hands together, letting that word hang in the air.

“The truth is, the thing that makes you different from Zod and the Kandorians, the thing that makes you different from Jor-El, and the thing that makes you the hero that you are, and that you can be going forward, isn’t just that Earth is your home and you want to defend the place that you live, and it isn’t just that the Kents raised you with a strong moral compass, and it isn’t some ‘power equals responsibility’ equation. You are the hero that you are because you love and value the people around you. And you can’t let go of that, even though it hurts right now.

“Zod believes that in order for the creation of a new world, the old one must be destroyed. And technically he’s right.” Clark nodded to himself. “He is right. And the old world was a mess, I won’t pretend that it wasn’t. But he’s trying to create a world that benefits himself and his people, without any thought for who he would harm in the process, and the truth is that’s just another version of the world he’s just destroyed. I choose to fight, and will continue to choose to fight, for the people of this world; not an abstract idea of a better place that leaves so many out in the cold.

“By trying to give up your human ties, younger me,” he finished, “you’re giving up the thing that makes you a hero. Don’t ever do that. I don’t care what Jor-El or anyone else says. The people I love are my greatest strength.”

A knock on the door interrupted anything further he was going to say, and Lois shut off the recorder as Clark called “come in,” over his shoulder. Chloe pushed the door open; it was the first time she’d entered the room since Clark had taken up residence there. The two of them hadn’t quite gotten back to their old camaraderie, but in the last few days things had warmed considerably between them. 

Lois felt a little like her family was putting itself back together.

“Hey,” she greeted them softly, sitting down on a corner of the bed. “I just talked to the Chicago faction; they’re on board to assist with a distraction this weekend.” The days of the week had blurred together for Lois since coming to this time period, but luckily Clark had kept up with them.

“Five more days,” he said quietly. “Then we can fix everything.”

“How’s your hand?” Chloe checked.

“Good enough,” Lois responded immediately. “My health insurance deductible isn’t going to be great when I get back, but I can fly well enough to keep Zod occupied.” She deliberately ignored the way Clark flinched when she said that. 

They hadn’t talked about it. They had very deliberately, very pointedly, not talked about it. He’d listened to her nerding out over the plane’s specifications and talking about all the cool tricks she’d done as an older teen, he’d joined in with Oliver in giving her grief over naming it “Game On,” and he’d used some profanity that she hadn’t realized he’d known when Kara managed to dig up an old video that Lucy had taken of her doing stunts at McConnell AFB. 

He hadn’t said anything about the plan, but he always looked physically pained when someone else would bring it up, and Lois would usually change the subject because she didn’t want to argue with him. 

If D-Day was in 5 days, then they were going to have to talk about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: someone is strangled; description is about as graphic as watching Thanos strangle Loki in Avengers Infinity War.


End file.
